Girl on the Best Seller List Page 2
• • •
Milo himself was slightly amazed at his own persistence in dating Glo. He would tell himself that he was simply going to ask her to see a movie with him “sometime next week” (maybe because he felt she needed him: he could dothat much, couldn’t he?) and then he would find himself actually cajoling her to be his date for the DKE hop. He, Milo Wealdon, one of the most popular men on campus, beggingher to let him take her out! He had read once something that H. L. Mencken had written, something about winking at a homely girl if you wanted to remember him. Was it Mencken’s epitaph? Whatever it was, Milo remembered that much, and when he first saw Gloria, he was compelled to pay special attention to her. She was standing off to one side, in a crowd at Willard Straight Hall. She seemed little and left over, and terribly nervous and embarrassed, and Milo had gone over to her and begun asking her questions, telling her anecdotes, making a fuss over her. Why?
• • •
And why, after that, had he kept on calling her, waiting outside classrooms for her,imploring her (yes, that was what it had been) to see him? She seemed no more flattered by his attentions than the most beautiful, popular, sought-after campus queen, and probably, Milo realized, a lot less. Over and over she complained to him about her inadequacies, and yet the fact that he said repeatedly that he liked her and everything about her never seemed to make her feel better. In a very subtle way his reassurances seemed only to make him appear all the more a fool in her eyes. As though she were saying: Well, all right, I know I’m no bargain, and if you’re too dumb to see that, then you’re no bargain either.
In a way, sandwiched between their gradual getting used to one another, between the rare moments when they would laugh together, say casual endearments, and eventually neck in the back seat of Milo’s old Plymouth, there was an uncanny unfitness about them as a couple. Even physically. Their noses were always colliding in an embrace; she would laugh just as Milo was about to kiss her, and his lips would be bruised by her teeth. They were clumsy on the dance floor, though with anyone else Milo was an excellent dancer. Even alone, when they had conversation, the normal rhythm was lacking: they interrupted each other; they both paused at the same time, so that there were long silences when neither of them could think of what to say, and when thoughts did occur to them, they came simultaneously and resulted in a near-shouting head-on collision. There were other things, too. Milo felt sorry for people Gloria felt were just stupid. Milo would say, “If someone would just give him a chance,” while Gloria would say, “He’s obnoxious, he deserves to be ignored.” Milo was a liberal. He believed in racial equality, and sometimes things he read in the newspaper would make him very angry; things about a race riot, or an example of discrimination — things like that. Whenever he talked about it, Gloria would lash out at him for being in a fraternity Jews couldn’t join; she would call him a hypocrite, and a bigot, and the discussion would end with her malicious and triumphant attack on him, with the issue he had brought up forgotten. Gloria was anti-religion, anti-Republican, anti-management, anti-everything, until Milo found himself more and more reluctant to talk about such matters with her. More and more he kept silent, simply listening, except when Gloria told him about the unfair things that had happened to her — the snubs, the ridicule, all the offenses against her, which were imagined in some cases, in others real. Then Milo would speak gently, compassionately. “You’re just as pretty as other girls, Glo. You just have it in your mind you’re not.” (A lie.) “You did have a rough childhood, and youdid come from pretty poor circumstances, but you had the guts to rise above it, didn’t you? And that’s something.” (The truth.) “You are well-liked, Glo. People like you…. I do need you, honey. Don’t say I don’t need you.” And so it went, falsehoods, truths, words pouring out of him to make her feel better — his arms locking out all the injuries, his mouth kissing away her anxieties. Why?
For a while, in the back seat of the Plymouth, Milo never tried to do more than kiss Glo. She was not particularly passionate, but she seemed to enjoy it when he was. As he experimented more and more, he realized this. He kissed her tenderly and slowly; then roughly, with a bare edge of violence in his manner. He kissed her eyes and her ears and her neck, and he let his tongue slip into her mouth. When there were no more ways left to kiss her, he began to tell her how attractive the rest of her was. She denied this, and he became all the more vehement in his protests. For a period, he seemed to dwell constantly on her lovely bosom, thinking of everything on earth he could compare it with, as he pressed her close to him. It seemed to anger her, until he felt he must prove that he meant it by fondling her. The only reason he had never tried before was that he was slightly old-fashioned. He did not think it was fair to a girl. He did not like men who took advantage of women.
Tortured by a suspicion that Gloria would never believe his well-meant compliments about her breasts until he paid her the supreme compliment of going up under her sweater in a moment of passion, Milo abandoned his moral concepts. What happened then completely shocked him. Before he knew what had happened, two pieces of foam rubber whipped him in the eye.
“Here!” she screamed at him. “That’s all you want anyway! Now for God’s sake, leave me alone!”
He was left sitting in the old Plymouth by himself, with a pair of falsies on his lap.
It was that incident which had inspired Milo’s first gift to Gloria — his sculpture of Saint Lucy. He wrote a little note to accompany the present:
This is Lucy. She’s the patron saint for those afflicted in the eyes. She’s supposed to have lived in Syracuse, and to have suffered martyrdom there about 303. There was a nobleman who wanted to marry her. She was supposed to be very beautiful; her eyes particularly were beautiful. The nobleman kept telling her so, until one day she tore out her eyes saying: “Now let me live to God.” Her day is December 13th. Will you marry me, or am I stuck with the falsies the way the nobleman was stuck with Lucy’s eyes?
His proposal was accepted.
Gloria still kept Saint Lucy under a small glass globe on the bureau in their bedroom.
• • •
After their marriage, Gloria had genuinely tried to change. She had a permanent wave, and she took care buying clothes. Whenever they entertained, she fixed new dishes and fussed throughout the evening, hurrying to empty ashtrays, refresh drinks, put pillows behind the guests’ backs, trying to say and do the right thing and look the right way. It was overdone — the permanent, the clothes, the hostessing — all of it. They lived in the town Milo was raised in, so that Glo was a newcomer. Milo had never thought of Cayuta as being an unfriendly community, but it soon seemed that way — from Gloria’s vantage point. His friends were as disinclined to accept her as his fraternity brothers had been. Her failure to win their acceptance hurt him deeply. At the same time, he wished Glo could just relax, just not try so damnably hard to be liked.
He got his wish. Eventually she stopped trying altogether. She went out of her way to dress like some kind of hoyden years younger than herself. She wore blue jeans and flannel shirts (hanging outside her pants) and she cut her hair and combed it in some crazy way that made her look as though she had been caught in a wind tunnel. No make-up. No embellishments of any kind. She was just there; take her or leave her. Milo sensed what she was trying to tell Cayuta:Icould be attractive if I wanted to be, but I couldn’t care less — not about any of you! It was along about this same time that she began aspiring to the arts: first oil paints, until she tired of cleaning out the brushes, only to start again at her miserable, glaringly-poor efforts; then the guitar (her fingers weren’t long enough, she complained — you have to have very long fingers); and, ultimately, writing.
• • •
She had worked hard on that novel. No one knew that better than Milo. She had sat at that typewriter like someone driven, day after day, and sometimes far into the early morning.
“I’ll show them,” she would say.
“Show them what, Glo?”
/> He needn’t have asked. He had seen Fern Fulton’s condescending smiles directed at Glo at parties, seen them and resented them, and yet, how many times had he himself flinched inwardly when Glo said something like “Oh, sperry-grass, with that old Dutch sauce Holland days,” at a dinner when asparagus was served, or “Where’s the wash rag and soap,” when a finger bowl was placed before her. And could he ever forget that afternoon at the Cayuta Country Club when Min Stewart had bent over to retrieve a glove she had dropped and Gloria had goosed her? Min Stewart, Cayuta’s formidable septuagenarian social lioness…. It was no mystery to anyone why Min had kept Glo out of the Cayuta Ladies Birthday Club. There was not a soul in Cayuta who believed Min’s excuse that there were already too many members in the club whose birthdays were in January. Perhaps Glo’s major forte was her devastating ability to choose the most inappropriate, unpardonable thing to do or say at a social gathering. Milo still blushed to recall the chicken-in-the-pot supper at Second Presbyterian church, when Glo had excused herself during the soup course with the announcement: “When you gotta go, you gotta go.” She had followed that vulgarity by glancing across the table at Jay Mannerheim, Cayuta’s new psychoanalyst, and saying, “I suppose my toilet training was lousy!”
“I’ll show them I’m somebody,” Glo had vowed. “I’ll write a book that’ll make their ears burn!”
While Gloria pounded the typewriter, Milo did another sculpture. It was of Saint Agatha, patron saint of the arts, and Milo took exceptional care with this one. He hoped it would be placed at the other end of their bureau in the bedroom, opposite Saint Lucy. When he presented it to Glo, she said, “You’d like me to be a martyr, wouldn’t you, Milo? You’d like it if I was an old piece of soap that you could coat with plastic and put on the shelf beside the other ones? Saint Agatha, huh?” she had snickered, and then snapped the sculpture in half, leaving it there on the cardtable where she worked, beside the ashtray of cigarette butts and the wads and wads of wrinkled typing paper.
• • •
That was the night Milo got that splitting headache, the first one he had ever had in his life. It was the same night he had accidentally spilled the scalding tea on Glo, after he had prepared it to dissolve the aspirins faster and tripped carrying it across to his chair.
He supposed, too, it was the night he had first thought of his plot for revenge. Those headaches came more and more frequently after that, and each time the plot thickened. It was the only relief for the pain….
• • •
Glancing down at the dirty breakfast dishes stacked in the sink that morning, Milo Wealdon sighed. He raised his fingers to his lips, and sucked in smoke from his near-spent morning cigarette. Revenge was a strange word for a man like Milo to have in his vocabulary. It was as unlikely as “hate,” or “greed,” or “lust,” or “evil.” Words like that had always been meaningless to him, applicable only to situations he was unconnected with. Yet today, the word revenge loomed larger than any other. Today was the day, wasn’t it? Again, he sighed.
At thirty-six he was in excellent form. His long body was strong and hard and agile. He was proud of the fact that he looked the way an instructor in Physical Education ought to look and usually didn’t. It was perhaps the only conceit he had left, his physique, and it played no small part in his revenge. At one time he had entertained the thought that his curly brown hair, his pug nose, and his round brown eyes lent his countenance the same youthful handsomeness his body exhibited, but Gloria had called a halt on that fantasy. In her novel she had described him asA Hercules from the neck down, and a runny-nosed bull dog from the neck up, with eyes as lusterless as the eyes of a fish on the end of a hook.
• • •
There was an expression of tired irritation on Milo’s face, suddenly aggravated by the fact that he realized he was running his tongue along the inside of his lower lip, the same way the stupid, weak-willed main character in Gloria’s novel always did wheneverhe was angry; the same way Milo always did too, though he had not been aware of it untilPopulation 12,360 was published. Now, he supposed, more than a million other people were aware of it as well. It had not helped matters any that Glo had named the numbskull hero Miles, or that she had dedicated her novel:
TO MY HUSBAND, MILO: A JUST REWARD
• • •
As the phone rang, and Milo went to answer it, he displaced his anger and indignation at what Gloria had done to him by deciding for the umpteenth time that whether or nothe deserved to havehis seams split open with a razor so that the sawdust all came spilling out, certainly the rest of the people in Cayuta, New York, did not deserve it! Glo had chosen a particularly vitriolic way of “showing” them; one that made her all the more a maverick in everyone’s eyes.
When he lifted the phone from its cradle, he spent the last of his rancor by barking his greeting.
There was a pause. Then Milo recognized Stanley Secora’s voice.
• • •
“Gee, Mr. Wealdon, I’m sorry to bother you. I — I just wondered if it would be okay for me to drop by this afternoon. I mean, ifMrs. Wealdon is going to be home.”
• • •
Immediately Milo felt obliged to sound enormously pleased that Stanley had called. It was partly because the timid and shy invariably reacted on him in such a way that he found himself duty-bound to make them feel wanted. But also, Milo felt this way toward Stanley because he knew the boy had developed an immense crush on Gloria, with the resulting error that Stanley believed he was destined to be a writer himself.
Vaguely, Glo was aware of him. Summers, Stanley cut the lawn sometimes, or helped put up the storm windows in the late fall. At odd intervals, he had helped Milo build compost piles for the lawn, plant Japanese Quince along the side yard, and paint the garage. Except for seeing him those times, and hearing from Milo of Stanley’s pathetic efforts in his Thursday evening tumbling class, Gloria had little reason at all to be aware of Stanley until her book was published.
Then, suddenly, Stanley began to talk of nothing else, of no one else. “Mrs. Wealdon” became his idol. He began to try to extract all sorts of miscellaneous information about her from Milo. He wondered about everything, from her preference in sweets to how many hours sleep a night she needed.
• • •
Once, during the tumbling class, Milo had snapped at him: “She likes coconut ice and she sleeps seven hours a night, Secora, but what the devil has any of that got to do withyou!”
After that, Stanley stopped coming to Milo’s class. He called once to announce that he was writing a novel, and would like “Mrs. Wealdon” to read it when she returned from New York. Milo felt so sorry he had lost his temper with the boy that he very graciously suggested Stanley write her, assuring him Glo would be tremendously interested in his work.
• • •
By telephone, Milo persuaded Gloria to drop Secora a post card, telling him to call her after the 20th of May, when she would be back in Cayuta.
It was now the 27th of May. Stanley had called eight times.
Milo said, “I’m delighted that you called. You know, we miss you at tumbling class.”
There had never been anyone more inept at the sport or more ill-suited to it than the dumpy, bespectacled stock clerk. Yet, in the beginning, Milo had never had a more eager pupil. He could not but admire Secora’s spirit. It wanted to soar, but it was weighed down; it was like a lily whose underground suckers imprisoned it.
• • •
Stanley said, “I’m working most of the time on my novel, Mr. Wealdon. Mrs. Wealdon sure inspired me. I mean, ifshe can write one of these best sellers, than I guess — ” He paused; then he began to stutter. “I — I d-d-didn’t mean it th-th-that way, Mr. Wealdon, I m-meant — ”
Milo said, “I know what you meant, fellow.”
“I meant she’s an inspiration.”
“Yes,” Milo said, “I know.”
He glanced down at the telephone pad on the table. The date was circl
ed on Gloria’s engagement calendar. Written across the page in large, triumphant letters, were three words:
PITTS ARRIVES TONIGHT.
Milo had not yet met Gloria’s literary agent, but already he hated him. Hate, another once-remote word that was now close, suffocatingly close.
“I told Mrs. Wealdon Saturdays were my day off,” Stanley continued, “and she said I should drop by this afternoon. You have the track meet and all, so I wouldn’t be horning in on your time, would I, Mr. Wealdon?”
Horning in onhis time. Milo wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t — not any more.
In smaller scribbling mid-way down the same page on the calendar Milo read:Lunch with Min Stewart! Hotel. 12:30.
He ran his finger across the words, and put his thumb down hard on the exclamation point, as though squashing a bug.
He said, “If I were you, Stanley, I’d drop by a little earlier. Before noon. Mrs. Wealdon isn’t here now, but I know she’ll be back in time to change her clothes.”
If Secora were to show up before she could get downtown for her luncheon date with Min Stewart, Glo would have to give him a little time.