A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

A week from the night they had first met, they were married. They had their whole future planned in the fifteen minutes it took to drive to the theater, holding hands in a black-and-white cab.

“But you want me to, don’t you?”

The old story: “I want you all to myself. But are you sure you won’t regret it later?”

“I’m never sorry for what I’ve done,” she said. “I’m a good sport.”

She gave the stage manager notice. And then she had to tell Jack. She stopped him in the wings. Distant hand-clapping filled the air like hundreds of little firecrackers all going off at the same time.

“Listen!” he said. “Is that for you?”

“I suppose so,” she answered absent-mindedly.

“You’ve got them eating out of your hand!” he cried joyously. “Go on out there!”

“No,” she said. “This is my last show. I was married this afternoon.”

In the dim light his face was a cipher to her. “Now? You’re going to quit now? After all I’ve done for you? I didn’t think it was in you to act like this!”

She kissed him lightly on the cheek. “It’s love, Jack, love! Do you want to know why I went over so immense just now? He was out front. I wasn’t acting, I was living my number.”

“I give you a year of that,” he called after her. “They all come back.”

“Good night, Miss Grayson,” the doorman said.

She smiled and opened her purse. “It’s Mrs. Martin now, Dave, and it’s good-by.”

He watched her step out into the alley under the dim light and walk away on her husband’s arm.

The flat (Brooklyn because “Where else could you get it for fifty-five?”) had a shining white refrigerator that purred like a kitten and made little frozen dice in a pan. It had a radio that hissed and spit if anyone crossed the floor in front of it but at other times poured forth the sweetest music mortal ears had ever heard. Furthermore, it had a dumbwaiter that miraculously disgorged itself of cans of peaches and cartons of cigarettes while a voice hidden somewhere in the bowels of the earth called up “Four seventy-five, please!” Zelda, used to hotel rooms all her life, brought no caustic comment to bear on ten cent cups and saucers and a sofa secured by a five dollar deposit; found in them the essence of the ideal, and crowed delightedly at the implication of personal ownership in all this. The lily needed no gilding, but for ornament there were her own striking wrappers and the Chinese lanterns she conscientiously fastened to all the lights.

The first weeks went by in a flurry of excitement. There were things to be bought. There were things to be done, things to be learned. How to make coffee, for instance. The only way she had known was to pick up a telephone and say “Room service.” And over and above all this there was love, breathless and absorbing. Until weeks grew into months and the excitement was less. Love did not grow less, but the excitement did.

Hers was to be no busman’s holiday. She stayed away from the places she had known. No more midnight lunches in restaurants filled with shop-talk. No more of friends who called her “honey” but would have cut her throat professionally. Once her costumer called her. “It’s all of silver fish-scales and just the thing for you. Lily de Vrie is wild about it, but I thought I’d give you first chance at it.”

“Let her have it,” Zelda said. “Haven’t you heard that I’ve quit?”

She didn’t want gold or silver or anything shining any more. Her eyes were a little tired of glitter. Diversion was to sit in a room, her very own room, with him there, with a lamp and a book and a cigarette there, and not have to sing for people, not have to smile. And if one stocking slowly dropped below her knee, it was luxury; it was better than a diamond-studded garter. She took pride in demonstrating her newest accomplishment now, made a cup of coffee as a special treat just before they retired, while the announcer’s voice was signing off to soft far-away music. If they had drained the pitcher of cream between them, she would scrawl a little note, “Borden: Leave us a bottle of cream tomorrow,” and curl it up in the neck of a bottle outside the door.

A few of Marty’s friends came out from time to time. She wanted to like them, tried to make them feel at home, but they invariably asked her to sing, entertain them in some way.

“I have a headache,” she would say. “Not just tonight, some other time.” They seemed to feel they had been snubbed.

“Don’t let’s have them any more,” she pleaded. “They’re always asking me to perform.”

“I’m afraid you don’t like my friends,” he said.

“They keep an imaginary spotlight on me all the time. If I walk into the room to say hello to them, they make an ‘entrance’ out of it somehow. They stop being just callers and turn into an audience right away. They want a show.”

“But I thought you liked the stage—”