But even when the excitement of the job was at its peak, the edges of his mind were frayed with loneliness for Sybil. And, later on, when the work settled down to the humdrum business of sorting, cataloguing, storing, and shipping, his longing for her turned into a constant ache. More tantalizing than the actual separation was the fact that he scarcely knew, and had scarcely loved, his wife. His colleagues, most of whom were older than his twenty-nine years, all seemed to have placid helpmeets who sat on American porches waiting for them and sent them snapshots of the children. Whereas Sybil was a figment of a dream, something he sometimes wasn’t sure had really happened.
She wrote to him, of course, but her letters, telling of her life among friends he had never met, against unfamiliar backgrounds, heightened his sense of distance from her. They gave him that feeling of disquiet that sensitive children get when they first realize their parents’ lives don’t center around the nursery.
His own parents wrote him letters that didn’t help. Between the congratulatory lines lurked midwestern suspicion of the foreign. What about her family, they wanted to know. And there wasn’t much he could tell them. All Sybil had ever mentioned was that she didn’t remember her mother, and her father had died just before the war started. There hadn’t been room for family discussions in the time at his and Sybil’s disposal. There had barely been room to eat. He had a notion that she came of genteel, possibly elegant, folk, but it didn’t bother him one way or the other when he was with her. Now, once in a while, it bothered him.
A thoughtful friend sent him an editorial from a Chicago newspaper, deploring overseas marriages. Ninety percent of these girls, it said right there in print, are out for what they can get. Tim utilized the editorial in the most fitting way, but sometimes, on sleepless nights, it would creep into his mind like a singing commercial and he would find himself brooding on possibilities that two minutes of Sybil’s companionship would have blown out the window.
The months dragged on. When he was finally released, he happened to be in the Tyrol and the simplest way home lay through Italy. He pulled all the wires he could to manage it via England, but he might as well have pulled dandelions. None of the Army’s channels led to England.
So it was that two and a half years after his marriage, he found himself in a New York hotel room with a tall, pale, intensely desirable stranger. He had a feeling that the house detective might knock at any minute.
Chapter Two
Not Even A Haystack
“Any champagne left?” asked Sybil.
“A spot,” said Tim. He lifted the bottle out of the now melted ice and poured the faintly fizzing remains into the goblets. Sybil thrust a bare arm from beneath the green quilt and raised the glass toward him.
“Here’s to reunion,” she said.
“Here’s to it.”
“Lots to be said for it.”
“Lots.”
“Almost worth the separation.”
“Well, no.”
“I said ‘almost.’”
She smiled at him over the rim of the glass. Her face and shoulders were creamy white above the green covering, against the duller white of the pillows. It was a face that might have been of classic beauty if the nose hadn’t been a touch too short, the mouth a shade too rounded, the eyes much too mischievous. Such a face Mr. Petty might have produced if he had ever tried to copy a bust of Pallas Athene. As for her hair, it was smoothly dark, although in tumbled disorder at the moment. She pushed it back as she sipped her champagne.
Tim sipped his, too. He felt fine, so fine that he almost forgot about the bad news he had for her. He was sitting on the foot of the bed with a gray Army bathrobe draped around his lanky frame. He had a long, lean face, which had been sunburned and hardened by the past few years, and which in repose was solemn. When he grinned, though, the solemnity turned into a pleasant boyishness, better suited to his rumpled brown hair. Unlike Sybil’s, it was always rumpled.
“Well, Mrs. L,” he said, “how do you like the United States?”
“Is that where I am? All I know is that I’m with you. That’s all I want to know.”
“A pretty sentiment.”
“True, too.”
Tim glanced at her. He was smiling, but there was an anxious little wrinkle in his forehead. “I hope it’s true,” he said. “It’ll make things easier.”
“What sort of things? Maybe I spoke too soon.”
Tim swallowed and said, “Housing. We’ve no place to live.”
“Oh,” said Sybil. “I thought you meant we were going to jail together or something of that sort.”
“We’d be better off in jail.”
“Don’t be so gloomy, darling. With you, I’d live in a haystack.”
“A vacant haystack,” said Tim, “would be harder to find than a needle inside one. You’d have to buy the needle, too.”
“Then why don’t we stay right here? Right here in bed.”
“We can. For five days.”
“They’d be five lovely days,” said Sybil dreamily. “Something to look back on.”
“No doubt,” said Tim, “but I don’t want to look back on them from a park bench.”
Sybil sat up and reached for a cigarette. “Oh, dear,” she said, “I suppose we’ve got to be serious about this.”
“Yes,” said Tim, “and you’re not helping matters by popping out from under that quilt. Get back.”
Sybil wiggled her shoulders wickedly as he lit her cigarette and one for himself. “All right,” she said, slipping lazily back onto the pillows, “let’s be serious. To begin with, where is it we can’t find a place to live?”
“Nowhere. Anywhere. Maybe you’d better rephrase the question.”
“I mean, where would we live if we could find a place to live where we were going to live?”
“That’s the last time I’ll ask you to rephrase a question. I think I get the general idea, though. And the answer is that it doesn’t much matter.”
“But don’t you have to be near that college in the Midlands where you teach children to put mustaches on the Mona Lisa?”
“Midwest, not Midlands. And we needn’t live there if we don’t want to.”
“Lumme,” said Sybil, “I’ve either married into the unemployed or the idle rich.”
“It’s like this,” said Tim. “I could go back to my old teaching job tomorrow if I wanted to, but even there the housing situation is murder. One of my confreres is living in a squash court.”
“Does he like squash?”
“Not any more. And besides, even if we could find a wigwam out there, I’d still be a lowly instructor. Which, financially speaking, is very, very lowly. On the other hand, if between now and next fall, I can wangle myself a Ph.D. degree, I’d stand a pretty fair chance of landing an assistant professorship someplace.”
“Would I have to call you Doctor?”
“Oh, sure. But you got used to calling me Captain, didn’t you?”
“More or less. How does one go about wangling a Ph.D.? Is there a black market in them?”
“Probably. However, I propose to go through the usual procedure of writing a dissertation. Something hefty. The fallacy of nationalism in the one world of art, something like that.”
“Most