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

“The stage is just a habit, and now I’ve broken the habit. Think what it means, to stay in one place all the time, to forget there are things like trunks and trains and eight o’clock shows.” She raised her chin as though it hurt. “See these little lines here? I had them when I was seventeen. I’m not old, but I’m so tired—”

She was a little different now from what she had been when he first saw her. And soon she was a whole lot different. He couldn’t understand what had happened. Every evening, rushing home under the East River in a crowded train, he thought of her as she had been, in the heart of that electric moon, a two-dimensional being, a product of lights and music, a stage effect, but bringing beauty into his life and his heart, a warmth that would linger there for the rest of his days. And every evening, when he got there and opened the door, he saw her as she was. It was a little hard to fit the two together. He thought: “Did I marry this girl? What is this girl doing here?” He couldn’t think of her in a kimono, loose ends of hair straggling about her head, sitting, drinking coffee from a thick cup. Couldn’t think of her that way at all. And one Sunday morning, as though seeing her for the first time, he said: “Why, you’re no different from anyone else this way.”

She sighed and said: “Do I have to be different? Can’t you take me as I am?”

And at another, later time she said: “I know. You wouldn’t have married me if you had known I would turn into a washout like this.”

“It isn’t that—” he said. “It isn’t that—” She had no right to read his thoughts that way.

But it was that. He knew it and she knew it too.

She had a little plan then. She would look as he wanted her to. He would come home and find the glamorous thing he had married waiting for him. She spent the afternoon getting ready. Had a wave put in her hair. A little perfume but heavy enough to cut with a knife. New eyes, new lips, new lashes, out of little boxes. A baby chandelier dangling from each ear. She saw herself in the glass. “How cheap I look,” she said. Men were funny. Maybe she would have to do this once or twice a week. But after she had taken it all off again, there would always be the radio and coffee, each time.

She slipped her hand through one more sparkling paste bracelet for luck. Then the telephone rang. He wasn’t coming. They were taking an inventory of stock, get away as soon as he could. She sat down abruptly on a chair and laughed for a very long time. She sat there holding a hand to her head and laughing. They really did those things, then, in everyday life. Rang up home and said they were detained by business when they wanted to take someone else out to dinner. She hadn’t believed it until now, thought it just a married-life “gag.” One of those funny-paper jokes. Now it seemed it wasn’t. She understood, of course. She knew by his very voice. Probably one of the salesgirls. She shook her head tenderly, was not at all hard-boiled. “Poor Marty. Poor boy. Got to have someone to dream about.”

And what about all this she had on? Simply because she felt unequal to the bother of taking it all off again so soon, she got up after a while and languidly called her old theater.

“How’s the new show going these days, Jack? I have a hunch I’ll drop around tonight. Leave a pass for me in the box-office.” Then she boiled herself a cup of coffee and sighed lugubriously. Anyone that would want to leave a cozy flat like this even for an hour must be a fool.

“Dressed up, looking like a Christmas tree,” she added aloud. She turned out the lights lingeringly, almost caressingly, and left. The last thing she heard through the door was the purr of the mechanical ice-box. “The darling!” she crooned, as though it were a child.

She got there late. The show had started. And when the house lights went up between the acts, there was Marty sitting precisely one row in front of her, with a friend. Not a woman, though. But even so, he had lied to her.

She left her seat hurriedly, furtively, trailing her wrap across people’s knees after her. She wouldn’t go back to it again when the audience settled itself for the second half. She was afraid he might turn around and see her. She felt guilty herself somehow — she couldn’t quite understand why. Probably because she had caught him unaware. She had once said to him, “I’m a good sport.”

Instead of going home at once, she went backstage to talk to Jack. “I don’t think my husband cares about me any more,” she said, half laughing, half in earnest. “I saw him in the audience just now.”

And when she left, Jack was saying, “That’ll give you two weeks to rehearse. And the de Vrie woman leaves in ten days. They can put in an understudy till you’re set. Now don’t forget, tomorrow at eleven!”

“I’ll be seeing you,” she said wearily.