The Cocktail Waitress (20 page)

If I slept I don’t know. I must have, but I was awake at daybreak and decided I had to get up. But when I put my foot out of bed I did it softly, making no whisper of noise. I opened the bathroom door an inch at a time, so I could go in, wash my face, comb, and put on my pantyhose. I went back in the bedroom, walking on stocking feet and not putting my shoes on until ready to go out. Then, a little bit at a time, I opened the sitting room door to peep if he was there. He wasn’t and I tiptoed through, making the hall and closing the door silently. Then I scooted for the stairs, not punching the elevator button for fear it would keep me there, waiting in the hall. Our suite was on the third floor, and I wound my way down and into the lobby. A clerk was at the desk, working on some sort of paper, but I simply said, “Good morning,” as though it meant nothing at all that a young bride should be up and out at six in the morning after her wedding night. Then I was on the street, walking.

The sun hadn’t come out yet, the whole place was veiled in fog and completely deserted, in spite of which I began to feel better. I walked to Trafalgar Square, which I knew from pictures I’d seen of it, to a statue of Queen Victoria, and on to a big ugly building I didn’t recognize. A police officer was there, as well as a sentry, and when I asked them what it was, the sentry said, “Buckingham Palace, ma’am.” A slight chill went over me. It was, I knew, the residence of the Queen, and if I’d ever envied her I didn’t anymore. Having to live in such a horrible place, I thought, must certainly take the fun out of the rest.

I decided I’d come far enough and turned around to walk on back. Now people were out, most of them women, who I knew by their looks were servants of one kind or another. And I was suddenly upset, that to make a living they had to get out at such an hour—it was still not yet seven. When I got back to the hotel it came to me that in some ways I liked the country a lot, in other ways not at all.

When I got back to the hotel I stopped at the desk to send a cable to Ethel. By now, of course, I knew the papers must have had the marriage of Earl K. White, but courtesy called for a wire from me, so I wrote one that began, “Surprise, surprise,” and then told her, and wound up, aiming for a friendly tone, with “Love, see you soon, Joan.” I paid for it myself, without it being charged to the room. Then I went up to the suite, to face my lord and master.

He came out of his bedroom with a razor in one hand, his face all lathered up, and wanting to know, “Where’ve you been?”

I told him “Out,” and then gave him a kiss like the one I’d allowed him the night before, a peck. He reacted so fast that it startled me, changing from annoyance to surprised affection, and pleading for “one more” as though it were something from heaven. I gave him one, realizing suddenly something I hadn’t quite got through my head before: that his feeling for me, though so far as I was concerned repulsive, was real. Or in other words, if I chose, I could have this man utterly, wind him around my finger and make him do as I wished any time I chose. And I thought to myself, then
choose.
He has all that you want out of life, not only for you but your child. So get on with it, get on with
him,
so life can move forward.

Easier said than done.

I spent the whole day trying to go through with my big idea, of being nice to him. There were three buttons on the table, each with a picture beside it, one of a waiter, one of a maid, and one of a bellboy. “A lot of their guests,” he explained, “don’t speak any English,
so for them it’s made plain.” I punched the one for a waiter, and suddenly there he was, a napkin on one arm, a menu card in his hand. “I never take anything but rolls, buttermilk, and black coffee for breakfast,” said Earl. Of course I wanted bacon, eggs, and toast, but I smiled and went along with his tonic water of a breakfast for myself as well. We ate it together in the sitting room, he still in pajamas, I in my walking clothes. When the food was gone, he dressed, not inviting me to watch, to my relief. Then started what would have been an interesting day, if it hadn’t been for the finish I was dreading it would have.

We went to lunch at Simpson’s, a place I’d heard about, which was just a few steps from the hotel. I ordered steak, being hungry still from breakfast, “a Delmonico steak, just a small one,” but the waiter told me they didn’t have one—“We’re strictly a join-’ouse, ma’am.” “Join-’ouse” seemed to mean a place that served roast meat only, so I ordered roast beef instead. When it came he carved and served me— one slice only, and I fear my face blanched, or perhaps my stomach rumbled. Earl passed over a coin, and the waiter, looking pleased and surprised, said “Oh, thank you, sir,” and cut me another slice. “You’d think,” said Earl when the waiter had gone, “that no one had had that idea before, of pitching in with an extra shilling—in point of fact it’s a ritual. If I hadn’t done it he’d have found some way to remind me. They’re a funny bunch, the English. They always have to pretend.”

I, meanwhile, was wolfing down the meat, which was tender and terrific. I wanted to know more about it, so when we had finished our lunch Earl disappeared for a minute, only to return with the manager, who showed me around the kitchen while my new husband took some more coffee at our table. I must say I was fascinated. The meat hangs on hooks at the end of chains, which turn slowly in front of a bank of live coals, roasting out in the open. To keep it from burning they wrap it in brown paper.

When I went back upstairs I felt I had learned something.

*

It was after three when we got back to the hotel, and he led the way up to the suite. “Time I took my nap,” he said, “Doctor’s orders—but everyone ought to do it, they’d feel better, and probably live longer. Why don’t you take one, Joan?”

“Then O.K., why not?”

I didn’t much care, one way or the other, but if it pleased him, was willing to give it a try. So we went up, he going to his room, I to mine. I slipped off my clothes, and was just reaching for my nightgown when there he was at the door. He stood there for a long moment staring at me. “… I hope you don’t mind,” he stammered. Then: “You’re so beautiful I have to look.”

“I don’t like to be looked at,” I answered. “At least in the daytime —it doesn’t seem right, somehow.”

“Day or night doesn’t make much difference in how you look. You’re the same girl, either way.”

By now he was close to me, and I instinctively turned my back, but that turned out a mistake. When he put his arms around me, it put his hands over my breasts, and he did what he’d done the night before: cupped them and kneaded them with his fingers. I hated it, and began pushing him off, hooking my fingers in his, to pull them away from me and make him turn me loose. We began to wrestle, he making a game of it, laughing and gasping for breath. But I’m fairly strong, and pretty soon had his hands in mine, holding them clear, while I shoved him with my hip. Then suddenly he gasped, and when I looked was lying across the bed, his hands pressed to his chest. “Joan,” he whispered, “will you get my pills for me—my nitro pills, from my bed in the other room? They’re in a bottle, at the head of the bed. In a little vial—would you hurry, please?”

I hurried, not waiting even to throw something on, and there sure enough, on the shelf at the head of his bed, was the tiny bottle he spoke of, and I raced with it back to him, unscrewing the top as I

went. “That’s it,” he gasped. “Give me one—so, in the palm of your hand.”

He took the pill I gave him, popped it into his mouth and then poked it under his tongue with his finger. Then, in a moment: “Give me another one, Joan.” I did, and he jammed that one under his tongue, too. Then he lay there, eyes closed, as though waiting. Slowly the strain on his features began to subside. Then: “I’m sorry, Joan—I can’t help it. The pain is indescribable, and the pills help but it still goes on.” Then: “If I die—”

“Earl!”

“If I die,” he insisted, speaking still with some difficulty, “I want you to know what to do. Please have me cremated—it’s important to me, Joan, please listen. Have me cremated and take my ashes to Maryland, for burial in our family plot, in the College Park Cemetery. My will is drawn, signed, and in my deposit box. You’re the sole beneficiary, Joan, except for some remembrances to my staff. I had my lawyer see to it.”

“Please don’t talk like that.”

“I try to face reality.”

I didn’t think he was going to die. I certainly didn’t want him to, despite what he’d just told me about his will. All I could think of was that now at last I’d have a real excuse for holding him off, and not letting things get started in the way he seemed to want, when it came time for me to undress.

Unfortunately, it didn’t last. He remembered the pain only as long as he felt it, clamping his chest in a vise. Once past, it was quickly forgotten, or if not forgotten then he chose to overlook it, and was back each evening despite all my reminders of the danger he faced. “I’ll only watch,” he would say, cajoling me. Except that he wouldn’t only watch, as seeing me in the nude seemed to exert a magnetic pull on him, such that his hands invariably found their way to my body, at which point he’d say, “I only want to feel you in my arms”—but if I’d let him do that, I know it wouldn’t have stopped there, either.

And to think he’d once waved Casanova in my face, as proof of women’s weakness and inability to resist the physical act of love—or of their not knowing any other way, to be more precise. Well, he didn’t seem to know any other way, and I had my hands full just keeping him off of me. Twice more he’d needed an application of his nitroglycerin, to the point that I began to worry his supply might run out. But he reassured me, when I raised this concern, that there was a British chemist on call to supply more if he needed it.

For a week or more, I bore up under the strain. During the days, I could relax and enjoy London, which I proceeded to do, in the morning mostly, slipping out as I had that first day, before he got up. I picked up a pal, a girl I ran into by accident in front of the National Gallery. I knew she was American by her clothes and we hit it off at once. Her name was Hilda Holiday. She was from Texas, just a little bit older than me, and was staying, with
her
new husband—her first and only—at the Charing Cross, on the Strand, which was where I stopped by for her each day. She wouldn’t come to the Savoy because,
as she put it, “I wouldn’t have the courage.” I told her it didn’t take courage to walk through those doors, only money, but she laughingly said, “I wouldn’t have enough of that either.”

Her husband was a stay-in-bed type, mornings at least, leaving her free to wander the city a bit, and we took to wandering together. We hit it off with one another, and did a lot of laughing, like at the sentries at Buckingham Palace, trying to make
them
laugh. We never succeeded, but once, by the way he cut his eyes in our direction, we knew one boy heard us. Then we laughed at the parking lots, which seemed to be everywhere in the most improbable places. We said, “They have more lots than cars,” for by that time we’d both noted how little traffic there was, even in the rush hour—not a tenth of what New York has, or any American city. And then one day, piled alongside a lot, we noted a wall made of loose bricks, and of course started laughing about it, how “a little mortar might help.” But the attendant chimed in, “Temporary, you know—” or “temp’ry,” as he called it. “From the Blitz, that was all that was left from the bombing. Nothing to do with the space but rent it—it brings in a bit, and it helps.”

So the parking lots were explained, and didn’t seem quite so funny.

In the afternoons and evenings I lost Hilda’s companionship and regained my husband’s, and it became a pitched battle, or anticipation of one, until he finally fell asleep—and even so, I was never sure he might not wake in the middle of the night and be taken with the notion to join me in my bed. The bedroom doors did not have locks on them, but I took to placing a chair under the knob. I didn’t know if it would keep him out, or how I would explain it to him if it did, but at least the sound of his trying to get in would wake me, so I’d have some warning.

One morning, coming into the lobby of the Charing Cross, I must have looked tired, or anyway anxious, and perhaps a bit haggard as well, with dark circles beneath my eyes that no amount of makeup could entirely hide, because Hilda pulled me aside before we stepped
out and asked if everything was O.K. I said yes, of course, but opened up a little—her husband was older as well, though not as much older as mine, and she’d confessed to me earlier that she’d had some fear leading up to their wedding night. Of course, she had been a virgin; I didn’t have her excuse. But fear was fear and she recognized the signs on me, so I admitted I was feeling some tension, and when pressed conceded, without explaining the actual situation, that the tension was connected to relations with my husband.

Reaching into her purse she pulled out a small pill case, one of those little metal ones with the appliqué flowers on the top, to make it look more feminine and less pharmaceutical. Inside, on a layer of tissue, were five broad tablets and she urged me to take one. When I took one out, she urged the rest on me as well and wouldn’t hear no, saying she had more upstairs and could give those to me too if I needed. “It’s a sedative my doctor gave me, before the wedding, when I told him how I was feeling about—well, you know. Thalidomide, it’s called. He says it isn’t bad for you, not like Miltown or those others you hear about.”

I swallowed it dry and she insisted again that I take the rest with me, for later, “as I no longer need them, now that things are so good with Tom.” I thanked her, already feeling better.

“You might as well have the whole bottle then, Joan—I’ll bring it tomorrow. I like knowing they’ll get some use. And you look so worn out.”

The timing was fortuitous, as the next day brought a new cause for anxiety that made all the prior incidents seem minor. Earl, writing some sort of bank draft in the sitting room, looked over from our desk and asked what the date was: “It’s on the paper, will you look?” I looked, and it was October 22. He thanked me for it, and kept on writing. This would have counted as one of our less troubled conversations, you might think—but suddenly I was struck by the significance of
the date. I felt it in my belly like I’d been punched. The day we caught Lacey, on the way back to my car afterward, I remembered passing the information counter with its giant clock and the date posted on the board beside it, and saying to Tom, “September 30 will be a date to remember the rest of my life.” So, that was three weeks ago— three weeks and a day.
And how long before that was my period?
It came to me I was due, and that if I had passed the date I was pregnant. And suddenly a trip to London, something I’d always dreamed about, was transformed into a nightmare.