Adios, Scheherazade

Another reason is that Betsy and I live at different schedules, she locked into Fred’s sleeping and rising habits, me locked into the fact that I usually work best at night. It’s early afternoon now, about one o’clock, but I’m running scared this month and I’m talking about usually. Usually Betsy goes to bed at twelve or one and I go to bed at three or four. She gets up at eight or nine and I get up at eleven or twelve. So a lot of times she’s already out to the store when I get up, and I make myself a cup of coffee and wait around for her to come back and make breakfast.

That was the way it was Friday, though I wasn’t exactly waiting for breakfast. I was mostly waiting to find out whether or not my skull was going to crack open from the top of my nose up over my head and down to the back of my neck. I would have taken three to two on the positive. As a result, I was up an hour or more before I began to spot the odd signs, the drawers half open, the things gone from here and there.

I didn’t get it. I was just as baffled as Paul, I couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong. It had been so long since Betsy had read any of my books it never even occurred to me that she might have gone in and looked at the new manuscript. It never entered my mind.

But that’s what she did. I don’t know if she did it Thursday night after I fell asleep or Friday morning when she got up. In either case, I know why she did it, and that only makes it worse.

In Chapter 1, I mean the real Chapter 1, the one that counts, I have Paul having this great rebirth of feeling toward his wife, which isn’t exactly the way things worked in real life. I have that rebirth now, since she left, but there wasn’t anything special in my feelings before then. I was glad the fight was over, but that was just about all.

It was Betsy that had the rebirth first, I see that now. That was why she was taking the lead Thursday night, and that was why she decided she ought to start reading my manuscripts again. Also, I suppose, because I’d let her know in a vague sort of way that I was having trouble with this book, and she knew about me being late the last half-dozen times, and I suppose she meant to read it and say some nice things about it and give me some encouragement.

So she read it.

The note she left is the one I quoted in the last chapter.

The rest of Friday was just this horrible day. I did try to call her at her parents’ house, but she hadn’t arrived yet and they didn’t know she was coming and they didn’t know what it was all about. She’d left me the car, so she must have called a cab to take her to the station, and I considered hopping into the car and driving up there after her but I couldn’t do it. I was afraid of Birge and Johnny, for one thing, and I was also afraid of myself. I was afraid to get into the car, I figured I’d kill myself in the first fifty miles. My nerves were shot, my attention was shot, my morale was shot, everything about me was shot.

So I just walked around, and every once in a while I’d make a phone call to somebody and tell them Betsy left but not tell them why. They’d always ask, and I’d always say I didn’t know. I called Rod, and I called Pete, and I called Dick. Dick wasn’t home and Kay answered and I told her, and she asked me if there was anything she and Dick could do. I said no. She asked me did I want to come into town and stay with them. I said no. She asked me did I want her to come out and talk with me for a while, and I understood she was offering me the follow-up after all, the way a certain kind of woman responds to tragedy with chicken soup, and I said no. I said no for two reasons. First, because I didn’t want Kay, or anything that Kay implied, or any of the emotional complexity of Kay, or any woman like Kay, or anybody else at all but Betsy. And second, because I had this nutty idea that if I demonstrated my saintliness by refusing Kay I would eventually get Betsy back.

I called other people, I called my mother in Albany and Hannah answered the phone and I told her and she sounded very sympathetic, but she can’t help the ice in her voice. Her sympathy sounded like the sympathy of a cold nurse for a terminal patient she doesn’t much care for. I asked her if Mom was around, but Mom was at work at Limurges Restaurant. She asked me if I wanted the restaurant number, if I wanted to call Mom at work, but I said no, what had happened to me was a disaster but riot an emergency, I could talk to Mom some other time. I asked her if she’d heard from Hester recently, and she said Hester had a new address, somewhere in San Francisco. She gave me the address, it was c/o Blench, and I wrote it down with the feeling that it was very important, though I wasn’t sure why.