Away from Home (44 page)

She felt tears begin at the thought of herself growing old and withered, but she fought them back. Carlos might call her, and she would have red eyes. The telephone tempted her, there in the hall. She dialed Carlos at his office but then replaced the receiver just as his phone began to ring. Let him telephone her, if he really had told all his friends he was madly in love with her! Her fingers darted nervously over the numbers on the dial as she tried to remember Helen’s telephone number.

“Is Dona Helen there?”

“No, Senhora. She is away for two days.”

“When did she leave?”

“Early this morning. Very early. Is not here.”

“Where did she go?”

“Don’t know, Senhora,” Helen’s maid answered cheerfully. “I forgot.”

“Did she go with Senhor Bert?”

“No. She went alone. Senhor Bert is not here.”

“Thank you,” Leila said.

“Is nothing.”

Leila hung up, feeling lonelier than ever. She was sure now that Sergio’s mistress must be Helen. How curious to find out these things about your friends! Life was full of ironic surprises. She had a lump in her throat when she thought of what Mariza had told her about Carlos, the same sort of bewildered ache she used to feel when she was a child and she had been left alone at night in the dark. But at the same time she felt lightheaded. Her cousin Izabel knew Carlos, and Izabel was a worldly woman. Perhaps Izabel could help her, advise her on what to do. And Izabel would be speechless with surprise when she heard about Sergio and his new affair. And her friend Vera; Leila had not telephoned her for two weeks. Vera must be angry at her by now. And her friend Gilda, who had given such a nice dinner party the same night as Helen Sinclair’s. Leila should call to
thank
Gilda, at least.

She dialed the first number quickly, and when she heard Izabel’s maid going off to call Izabel to the phone Leila felt the lump in her throat begin to dissolve. The pain softened away, and she felt the light fluttering beginnings of excitement again. “Oh, Izabel!” she cried happily, smiling at the reassuring sound of her cousin’s throaty voice. “I have not spoken to you for such a long time! I have so much to tell you!”

CHAPTER 20

In five years of marriage Margie Davidow had become less naïve about everyone’s marriage but her own. If she was not quick to notice the sign of a restless or unfaithful husband she at least accepted the secondhand information with a knowing nod, and said, “I’m really not surprised,” or, “Yes, I suspected something like that.” She never considered a scandal shocking or disgraceful, even when it happened in her own country club to people she had known well; it was as if unfaithfulness and adultery and ugliness never actually touched her in any way. It was all abstract, and being abstract she was able to accept it with a knowing womanliness she really did not possess.

She had always known that Neil was attractive to other women, but she had always thought of it more as the attraction to a handsome man, not a sensual one. He was her clean-cut, good-looking husband, and when they walked in to a party together Margie noticed with pride when other women looked at him or tried to meet him, but she never thought any of them actually wanted to have an affair with him. Perhaps it was because he did not have that effect on her. She knew he was a normal man, she did not think he was a masochist or a saint, but she had never really thought about the future. If Neil had been anyone else’s husband, occupying his lonely bedroom, Margie would have been immediately alert to trouble. But the walls of her own home surrounded and lulled her, reassured her, like a symbol: home, the magic circle, like a wedding ring. She knew that Neil had been staying later and later at the office in the evenings, sometimes even going briefly back there at night, but she thought—well, if she thought anything she thought rather shamefacedly that he was sublimating through overwork.

One evening at the end of March he said something strange. They had finished dinner and were deciding whether to call some friends, go to a movie, or play chess. Lately they were seeing people a great deal, they seemed to go nowhere alone together, and on the few evenings that they stayed in their apartment alone they played furiously concentrating games of chess in which nothing was said for hours while each one tried to win. But tonight Neil seemed nervous.

“You know,” he said, from nothing, out of the clear blue sky, “if either of us decided to marry again, he’d have to admit it right away.”

“Marry who?” Margie said, and she smiled at him. “Who’d marry me?”

“
Either of us
,” he repeated, rather sharply.

She looked at him, her smile fading, and she felt cold for a moment in her throat, as if she had swallowed an ice cube. “Of course,” she said then.

“If you wanted to marry again I would give you your freedom. And if I wanted a divorce the same would hold true. Don’t you agree?”

“You sound like a lawyer.”

“Let’s go to the Ricamar,” he said. “They have an American movie.”

They went to the film, they sat side by side, but Margie hardly saw any of it. She glanced at Neil’s profile from time to time, but he was staring straight ahead at the screen, his jaw tensed, and she wondered if he were really seeing the movie either. No one forgot himself at a film when he bore a look of such obvious effort at concentration. She supposed it was silly to get herself worked up about their conversation. Divorce was not such an outrageous thing to mention in the abstract; it was quite possible that someday one of them might … She didn’t want to think about it. But it was true they had to mention it, just in case someday …

A week later he brought the subject up again. It was a Sunday morning, and they were having a late breakfast together. They always liked to eat breakfast together on weekends, even though they awoke at different times, and so whichever one had eaten first would sit at the table again and have a second breakfast with the other. This day it was Neil. He had been awake for hours; he was even shaved and dressed. It was only ten-thirty. Margie felt the coffee pot, decided the coffee was not hot enough to be the way he liked it—he could scald his throat, that crazy man, he never seemed to feel it—and she sent the maid back to the kitchen to heat it up.

“You’re not eating anything, darling,” Margie said to him. “Did you have the figs I bought for you? And I bought Catupiry, a fresh one, here.” She held out the white, soft cheese in its round wooden box, so he could see how good it looked.

“You should be a wife,” Neil said, softly and sadly. “You should always be a wife.”

“I
am
a wife.”

“And you should have children, lots of children, all around you. Babies for you to mother until they’re grown-up babies.”

His tone frightened her. It was too wistful to be a compliment; it was more of an epitaph. “What?” she said, very gently. She put her hand over his on the blue tablecloth, gently too. “What, Neil?”

“I told you before … if we didn’t last … if we—” The maid came in with the pot of newly hot coffee and put it on the table, and Margie and Neil sat facing each other silently, her hand on his, until the maid had deposited the coffee pot and left. “I want a divorce,” Neil said.

She kept on looking at his face and she was too stunned to cry or even feel anything beyond a sickening falling sensation. There was no pain, only the falling. “Divorce?” she said stupidly.

“I have to do it this way.”

“Why?”

He slid his hand away from under hers as if he felt too guilty to continue touching her while he said these dreadful things that were going to destroy her life. Or perhaps, Margie thought suddenly, because he could no longer bear touching her at all. She felt for the first time as he must have when she could not let him touch her, and for the first time tears came to her eyes. “Why?” she said again. “Why?”

“You know I’d never leave you all alone if there wasn’t someone else,” he said. “You know that, don’t you? I’d stay with you, no matter what happened between you and me. But I can’t stay with you now, because there
is
someone else.”

“You mean there’s a girl?” She didn’t realize how stupid the words sounded until they were out, and then she had to smile at them and Neil smiled too, and then she began to cry. She put her hands over her face and tried to stop crying, and after a minute or so she did. “I wouldn’t have cried,” she said, gasping, “if I hadn’t started to laugh.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Neil said.

“Well, tell me who she is.”

“She’s a Brazilian girl.”

“…
Brazilian
?”

“She works in my office. She’s a secretary. You don’t want to hear any of this, do you?”

“Yes, I do,” Margie said. “What’s her name?”

A change went over his face—emotion, then fright, then resolution. That girl, the intruder, hadn’t been real until this moment, but as soon as he said her name she would be, unremovably real. “Her name is Gilda.”

“Is she beautiful?”

“I think so. She—it’s funny, she looks a lot like you.”

“Oh, Neil.”

“I want to marry her,” Neil said.

Margie looked at her hands. She looked at the food on the plates beside them. It looked like garbage. It was odd that her knuckles were so white under her tan because she couldn’t feel her clenched hands at all. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’m very sure.”

“Are you having an
affair
with her?”

He didn’t answer for a moment. For that moment, which seemed very long, Margie dared to think that he had not slept with this Brazilian girl, that she was forcing Neil to marry her because it would be the only way that he could sleep with her. But then she knew he would not make the same mistake twice. She could see his idea of chivalry toward this girl and his loyalty to herself warring in him; she had never seen him look so unhappy. “Yes,” he said finally. “Of course I am. What did you think?”

“I’m glad,” she lied.

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am!” She was almost shouting, she glared at him. “It’s good, isn’t it, with this girl?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m glad,” Margie said, but her voice broke.

“Margie, I
love
her,” Neil said. “She’s a very sensitive, intelligent, kind of a sad girl. She thinks I’m the most wonderful person who was ever invented.” He smiled wryly. “And I need her. I want to be with her all the time.”

“Oh, why are you so moral?” Margie asked. “Why do you have to
marry
her? You don’t have to marry her, do you? You could just go on this way. I would let you.”

“I can’t go on this way.”

“She’s pregnant! Is she?”

“No, of course not.” He smiled. He wasn’t angry, simply amused at her ridiculous idea that this might be a shotgun wedding and not a love marriage at all, and then for the first time Margie felt real pain. She felt it, it was like fire, all over her whole body, but she was cold at the same time. “I can’t go on this way,” Neil said, “because I need a life. Not half of a life, like you and I have, or two separate halves of a life, the way I would have with you and with her. I need a whole life.”

“I guess she wants to marry you,” Margie said.

“Yes.”

“But she’s
Catholic!
Isn’t she? She can’t marry you if you’re divorced, and—” she was beginning to feel a little better, and her voice rose in excitement—“and did you tell her you’re Jewish?”

“We went through all this. She wants to marry me. And I want to marry her. Period. Finished?”

“Your mother will kill herself,” Margie said faintly.

“Not if she knows I won’t be there to revive her.” Neil smiled. “You know, the ironic thing is that if you and Gilda had ever met each other you would have liked each other. You would have liked each other very much.”

“Don’t plan anything perverted like having us become friends,” Margie said.

“You’ll never meet.”

It hurt her, the way he said that, so sure of himself, already protecting this girl and his relationship with her, as if she were some delicate special flower. Margie poured a cup of coffee for herself and one for Neil, automatically, because if she did not go on now doing the everyday things she thought she would scream or strike him or throw herself out of the dining-room window. She tasted the coffee and it had become cold.

“The coffee’s cold again,” she said.

He was looking at her carefully, to be sure if she were all right or if she were only pretending. She tried very hard to make her face look as if she really cared whether or not the ridiculous coffee were cold, as if she could ever care about those things again. She wondered what the girl looked like. Like herself? Dark? Darker than she was? Small? Neil picked up his cup and gulped down all the lukewarm coffee, completely oblivious for the first time in his life to the fact that it was almost undrinkable.

“It’s
cold
,” she said.

“I didn’t notice.”

“Do you want some toast?”

“I could eat some toast.”

“One piece?”

“Thank you.”

“Does she speak English?”

“You don’t want to talk about that any more, do you?”

“They always give the condemned a last request.”

“
Margie
—I’m not going to walk right out of your life. I
love
you, in a way, and I always will. There’ll never be anyone who means the same thing to me in the same way as you do. I can’t throw away five years of marriage. Don’t you know how much this hurts me too?”

“Yes. Does she speak English?”

“She went to college for two years in the States. Radcliffe, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, my God!”

He dropped the toast, untasted, on to his plate and tossed his napkin on top of it. He lighted a cigarette, and both the cigarette between his lips and the match between his fingers were shaking so much he could hardly do it.

“I guess I should go home,” Margie said. “I don’t want to stay here. What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to do exactly what you think you should do.”

“I can’t think. I don’t know what to do.”

“First of all, I’m going to move out,” Neil said. “I have a little apartment at the other end of the beach, a sublet. I’ll leave tomorrow.”