He watched Peanuts conducting a tour of inspection of the floor, with particular emphasis on his suitcases. Then the big cat approached him and rubbed against his legs. “He’s a fine cat,” he said.
“She’s a lady cat, ain’t you, Peanuts? Old man Martin in the basement says ginger cats are nearly always boys, but I don’t believe him. Anyway, she’s not.” As the cat continued to rub against him the landlady said, “She likes you.” He knew then, without particular enjoyment, that he had passed muster as a prospective roomer.
“It’s nine dollars a week, you said on the phone — ?” he began.
“Yes, Mr. Fowler. I run a clean and decent house here. This room has a good view of the garden, and you have garden privileges of course. As I already said I can’t allow cooking in here, but if you stay here next winter I might be able to fix you up with a hot plate and things for making a cup of coffee. I’m Mrs. Hill.”
“How do you do,” he said, proffering a ten-dollar bill.
Since meeting her he had been trying to pin down her slight accent. It was Germanic, and didn’t go with her name.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Hill,” he asked, “Are you German?”
She hesitated a second too long before she answered, “No, I’m Swiss.”
She extracted a receipt pad from a pocket of her cardigan and pulled an unseen pencil stub from the nest of her hair. As she wrote out the receipt she said, “Guests have to be out of your room by eleven o’clock, and I don’t like my men roomers bringing in too many women.” Clicking her teeth in a conspiratorial grin, “I know what men are, you know.” She pulled a crumpled dollar bill from the same pocket that had held the receipt pad and handed it to him along with his receipt, taking the ten dollars with the practised ease of a craps table croupier. Then with a flourish she handed him a pair of keys she had been palming all along.
“How long do you think you’ll be staying with us, Mr. Fowler?”
“I really don’t know.”
“You said on the phone you were an editor, I believe?”
“Yes.”
“What do you edit?”
“A small magazine. Just a trade paper. Real Estate News.”
“It sounds like a pretty important job.” Glancing around the room with an apologetic air. “This isn’t much of a place for a magazine editor to move into.”
“It’ll do. I’ve lived in worse places than this.” Seeing her bridle slightly, he hurried on. “I prefer to live in a furnished room — for now anyway. This one’s fine.”
She searched the floor for the cat as she said, “This isn’t much but it’s quiet here, I don’t believe in bothering my roomers.”
After she had gone he sat on the edge of the bed and contemplated the present. He wondered how Brenda and the boys were doing. Everything had happened so suddenly that he was still numbed from the shock of finding himself alone. For the past month he had tried to bring cohesion to his thoughts, to reconstruct piece by piece the march of events that had separated him from his wife and children. There was nothing when taken alone that was responsible, but a number of little things, insignificant in themselves but adding up to something that could be called incompatibility or even outright enmity between himself and Brenda.
Of course, there had been another woman. He smiled grimly as he thought of it. The woman was a proofreader employed in his office, a middle-aged spinster called Ivy Frobisher, a woman who meant less than nothing to him but who had served as the focal point of his wife’s irrational jealousy and hate. Once, when half drunk, he had mentioned an incident with Ivy which his wife had seized upon and used as an admission of things much worse between them.
Since then he had wondered why he had sacrificed a position of moral and ethical strength on the altar of his wife’s silly suspicions. At the time, he had wanted to show her that he was not a captive of marriage, that he was still a man whom some other women found attractive. Somehow, in his drunken state, this had seemed an opportunity he could not forego. Brenda had seized on it as a profession of guilt, and for the next six months had not let up on her insistence that what she knew was only part of the whole.
The whole story was much less than she believed, and was of such small consequence that now, long after it had contributed its venom to her hatred, he could scarcely credit it with breaking them up. The incident was this.
It was a cold autumn evening, and he had returned to his office to finish an editorial he was writing. He had been surprised to find Ivy still in the office, and had walked across to her desk.
“What are you doing here, Ivy?” he had asked.
“I’ve got some copy to go over, Mr. Fowler,” she said. “That piece about suburban school costs.”
Somehow as he looked down into her upturned face he saw her for a split second as she really was. Behind her heavy glasses and plainly handsome features she was a woman, and he had just discovered it. She saw his look, and taking off her glasses let her eyes pay naked thanks to him. He pulled her head against his chest and they remained like this for several seconds. Then, with a shudder, she rose to her feet and pulled him to her. Their mouths met in a long and trembling kiss, and her body curved itself against him.
When they drew apart and stared into each other’s eyes he knew she would do anything he asked. But then he felt the little cautionary twinge that warned him it would probably end as all attempts at lovemaking with other women had ended over the past few years. They drew apart and faced each other from a distance that was heightened by their recent kiss.
“If things were different, if I wasn’t married …” he said lamely as they drew apart.
“You don’t have to say anything, Walter,” she said, turning away. It was the first time she had ever addressed him by his first name.
He had returned to his own small office and sat there twirling a pencil in a hand that soon began to shake with feeling. Through his doorway came the sound of Ivy turning over the sheets of galley proofs. He could not rid himself of the knowledge that for one brief moment she had been his if he had wanted her, and he derided himself for his cowardice.
The fidelity that Brenda had been unable to procure with love and affection she had succeeded in bringing about, he believed, through inducing in him a psychological block that one woman had called his “misplaced moral standards.” It wasn’t that; he wished it were.
After a few minutes Ivy passed his doorway, walking as far from it as the outer office allowed.
“Good night, Mr. Fowler,” she said. “See you Monday.”
“Good night, Ivy,” he answered.
It had been a mistake to mention it to Brenda, of course, for she had twisted it into a sordid excuse for her decision to leave him.
The real breakup of their marriage, however, began with a visit from Brenda’s mother in the late winter. Lillian Hornsby was the kind of woman who thought that the filial devotion of children for their female parent was a one-way street, a divine right of mothers who could grandly ignore all but the ostentations of reciprocity.
She was a short woman, shrunk in size by seventy years and by a natural inclination to camouflage herself against her background. Her voice, like everything else about her, was quiet, not through reticence or politeness but through guile. She had been taught early in life that a soft answer turneth away wrath, and since then had pitched her poisoned darts disguised as little jokes, accompanied by a short cackle of weary resignation.
During the weeks she stayed at Walter’s house they had observed an armed truce, greeting each other with tooth-hidden scowls, generally managing to keep as far apart as the size of the bungalow would allow. Mealtimes had brought them into uneasy proximity, and Walter