But she had given him a son, and the experience of pregnancy had traumatized her: when she wasn’t actually suffering, she imagined she was, and after the birth she descended into a depression that continued more than a year. Every day she slept fourteen hours of Seconal sleep; as for the other ten, she kept awake by fueling herself with amphetamines. The second child, another boy, had been a drunken accident—though she suspected that really her husband had tricked her. The instant she knew she was pregnant again she had insisted on having an abortion; he had told her that if she went ahead with it, he would divorce her.
Well, he had lived to regret that. The child had been born two months prematurely, had nearly died, and because of massive internal hemorrhaging, so had she; they had both hovered above an abyss through months of intensive care. Since then, she had never shared a bed with her husband; she wanted to, but she couldn’t, for the naked presence of him, the thought of his body inside hers, summoned intolerable terrors.
Dr. Bentsen wore thick black socks with garters, which he never removed while “making love”; now, as he was sliding his gartered legs into a pair of shiny-seated blue serge trousers, he said: “Let’s see. Tomorrow is Tuesday. Wednesday is our anniversary …”
“Our anniversary?”
“Thelma’s! Our twentieth. I want to take her to … Tell me the best restaurant around now?”
“What does it matter? It’s very small and very smart and the owner would never give you a table.”
His lack of humor asserted itself: “That’s a damn strange thing to say. What do you mean, he wouldn’t give me a table?”
“Just what I said. One look at you and he’d know you had hairy heels. There are some people who won’t serve people with hairy heels. He’s one of them.”
Dr. Bentsen was familiar with her habit of introducing unfamiliar lingo, and he had learned to pretend he knew what it signified; he was as ignorant of her ambience as she was of his, but the shifting instability of his character would not allow him to admit it.
“Well, then,” he said, “is Friday all right? Around five?”
She said: “No, thank you.” He was tying his tie and stopped; she was still lying on the bed, uncovered, naked; Fred was singing “By Myself.” “No, thank you, darling Dr. B. I don’t think we’ll be meeting here any more.”
She could see he was startled. Of course he would miss her—she was beautiful, she was considerate, it never bothered her when he asked her for money. He knelt beside the bed and fondled her breast. She noticed an icy mustache of sweat on his upper lip. “What is this? Drugs? Drink?”
She laughed and said: “All I drink is white wine, and not much of that. No, my friend. It’s simply that you have hairy heels.”
Like many analysts, Dr. Bentsen was quite literal-minded; just for a second she thought he was going to strip off his socks and examine his feet. Churlishly, like a child, he said: “I don’t have hairy heels.”
“Oh, yes you do. Just like a horse. All ordinary horses have hairy heels. Thoroughbreds don’t. The heels of a well-bred horse are flat and glistening. Give my love to Thelma.”
“Smart-ass. Friday?”
The Astaire record ended. She swallowed the last of the wine.
“Maybe. I’ll call you,” she said.
As it happened, she never called, and she never saw him again—except once, a year later, when she sat on a banquette next to him at La Grenouille; he was lunching with Mary Rhinelander, and she was amused to see that Mrs. Rhinelander signed the check.
THE PROMISED SNOW HAD ARRIVED by the time she returned, again on foot, to the house on Beekman Place. The front door was painted pale yellow and had a brass knocker shaped like a lion’s claw. Anna, one of four Irishwomen who staffed the house, answered the door and reported that the children, exhausted from an afternoon of ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, had already had their supper and been put to bed.
Thank God. Now she wouldn’t have to undergo the half-hour of playtime and tale-telling and kiss-goodnight that customarily concluded her children’s day; she may not have been an affectionate mother, but she was a dutiful one—just as her own mother had been. It was seven o’clock, and her husband had phoned to say he would be home at seven-thirty; at eight they were supposed to go to a dinner party with the Sylvester Hales, friends from San Francisco. She bathed, scented herself to remove memories of Dr. Bentsen, remodeled her makeup, of which she wore the most modest quantity, and changed into a grey silk caftan and grey silk slippers with pearl buckles.
She was posing by the fireplace in the library on the second floor when she heard her husband’s footsteps on the stairs. It was a graceful pose, inviting as the room itself, an unusual octagonal room with cinnamon lacquered walls, a yellow lacquered floor, brass bookshelves (a notion borrowed from Billy Baldwin), two huge bushes of brown orchids ensconced in yellow Chinese vases, a Marino Marini horse standing in a corner, a South Seas Gauguin over the mantel, and a delicate fire fluttering in the fireplace. French windows offered a view of a darkened garden, drifting snow, and lighted tugboats floating like lanterns on the East River. A voluptuous couch, upholstered in mocha velvet, faced the fireplace, and in front of it, on a table lacquered the yellow of the floor, rested an ice-filled silver bucket; embedded in the bucket was a carafe brimming with pepper-flavored red Russian vodka.
Her husband hesitated in the doorway, and nodded at her approvingly: he was one of those men who truly noticed a woman’s appearance, gathered at a glance the total atmosphere. He was worth dressing for, and it was one of her lesser reasons for loving him. A more important reason was that he resembled her father, a man who had been, and forever would be, the man in her life; her father had shot himself, though no one ever knew why, for he was a gentleman of almost abnormal discretion. Before this happened, she had terminated three engagements, but two months after her father’s death she met George, and married him because in both looks and manners he approximated her great lost love.
She moved across the room to meet her husband halfway. She kissed his cheek, and the flesh against her lips felt as cold as the snowflakes at the window. He was a large man, Irish, black-haired and green-eyed, handsome even though he had lately accumulated considerable poundage and had gotten a bit jowly, too. He projected a superficial vitality; both men and women were drawn to him by that alone. Closely observed, however, one sensed a secret fatigue, a lack of any real optimism. His wife was severely aware of it, and why not? She was its principal cause.
She said: “It’s such a rotten night out, and you look so tired. Let’s stay home and have supper by the fire.”
“Really, darling—you wouldn’t mind? It seems a mean thing to do to the Haleses. Even if she is a cunt.”
“George! Don’t use that word. You know I hate it.”
“Sorry,” he said; he was, too. He was always careful not to offend her, just as she took the same care with him: a consequence of the quiet that simultaneously kept them together and apart.
“I’ll call and say you’re coming down with a cold.”
“Well, it won’t be a lie. I think I am.”
WHILE SHE CALLED THE HALESES, and arranged with Anna for a soup and soufflé supper to be served in an hour’s time, he chugalugged a dazzling dose of the scarlet vodka and felt it light a fire in his stomach; before his wife returned, he poured himself a respectable shot and stretched full length on the couch. She knelt on the floor and removed his shoes and began to massage his feet: God knows, he didn’t have hairy heels. He groaned.
“Hmm. That feels good.”
“I love you, George.”
“I love you, too.”
She thought of putting on a record, but no, the sound of the fire was all the room needed.
“George?”
“Yes, darling.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“A woman named Ivory Hunter.”
“You really know somebody named Ivory Hunter?”
“Well. That was her stage name. She’d been a burlesque dancer.”
She laughed. “What is this, some part of your college adventures?”
“I never knew her. I only heard about her once. It was the summer after I left Yale.”
He closed his eyes and drained his vodka. “The summer I hitchhiked out to New Mexico and California. Remember? That’s how I got my nose broke. In a bar fight in Needles, California.” She liked his broken nose, it offset the extreme gentleness of his face; he had once spoken of having it re-broken and reset, but she had talked him out of it. “It was early September, and that’s always the hottest time of the year in Southern California; over a hundred almost every day. I ought to have treated myself to a bus ride, at least across the desert. But there I was like a fool, deep in the Mojave, hauling a fifty-pound knapsack and sweating until there was no sweat in me.
I swear it was a hundred and fifty in the shade. Except there
