Free The Stork Club by Iris Rainer Dart

right you would."
    That was low, she thought, since they both knew she'd been planning on taking exactly that deal. She left the office and the building, and nearly got hit by a car when she crossed Sunset against the red light.
    "Ruuuthie." Davis always greeted her so warmly when she called to talk to Shelly, and maybe, just maybe there was a hint of mockery in the greeting. "How's the funnyness business?" he'd ask, and she didn't have an answer. Sometimes late at night she would just lie in bed, wanting to talk to Shelly, wishing she could go into the next room and find him the way she had for the years they lived together. Then she would picture him at home with Davis.
    But she never thought about the sexual part of theirrelationship. It was imagining the cozy part that made her envious. Shelly and Davis reading the Sunday paper together, doing the crossword puzzle, playing Scrabble. When it came to Scrabble there wasn't any way that Davis could give Shelly as big a fight as
she
had.
    She finished the project for Pam Dawber and was offered a two-year exclusive deal to write pilots for Twentieth Century-Fox TV. They would give her an office and a secretary at the studio, lots of money, and a parking place with her name on it. And all she had to write were a couple of pilots. Shelly was wide-eyed.
    "They'll give you how much? They didn't ever offer that much to the two of us."
    "I'll be glad to split it with you," she said, squeezing a lemon wedge above her salad and watching the juice spurt. "Just come back to work."
    "Can't" was what it sounded like he said, but later when Ruthie thought about it she decided that maybe he'd actually said something else.
    One night after Davis and Shelly got back from a trip to Hawaii, Shelly invited her for dinner. Davis barbecued the chicken outside while Shelly was inside making the salad, and Ruthie helped him chop. He seemed upset. Finally he said in a voice that was designed for Davis not to hear, "He's going to be traveling to New York a lot for the next few months on business. I'm going to go berserk without him. I'll probably be calling you every five minutes for solace."
    Ruthie was starting to feel annoyed every time she was with Shelly. The way he mooned over Davis, tiptoed around his moods and feelings, made every plan around Davis's whims and schedule. When she got into her car after saying good night to the two of them she decided she didn't want Shelly to call her for solace. And she wasn't going to call him. She was starting to make some friends over at Fox, some other womenwriters and a woman in casting. She would make dinner plans with them and keep busy, and Shelly would be just fine without her.
    Once, years before, when she lived in the dormitory at Pitt, she overheard a girl in the next room crying as she told a friend, "I called my mother and told her that he broke up with me. That he took his pin back from me and gave it to another girl on the same day, and do you know what she said? She said, 'Throw yourself into your work.' Throw yourself into your work? My life is ending and she says, 'Throw yourself into your work'!'' The girl's crying had echoed through the walls of the dormitory for hours.
    Ruthie thought of that incident while she tried to throw herself into her work. She wrote another movie of the week and got an assignment to write a pilot called "May's Kids," which was about a children's talent agent. One day she realized it had been more than two months since she'd spoken to Shelly. Apparently he had done just fine at home alone during Davis's New York travels. That hurt. It was one thing for him to be too busy for her when he was with his lover, but when he was alone. Not to call. Maybe something was wrong. Obviously something was wrong. Maybe she should call him.
    It was ten o'clock at night, not such a great time to call people out of the blue like this. The phone rang ten or twelve times, and Ruthie was about to hang up when she heard a tiny, quiet