Free Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics) by Richard Yates Page A

clutching the fly of his pants (as the ancient man had clutched his shrunken genitals in Bellevue and caused Spivack to say “Hey there, sexpot”), and in the momentum of his fury he would turn on Tommy too. “Yeah, yeah, yeah; you better take a good look, kid, and don’t forget it. Wise up. I’m your father. This is your mother. I’m a certified lunatic and she’s a cop, do you understand that? A
cop
! A
cop
!”
    None of that happened, but only because he stood whispering it all to himself, breathing hard, with one arm tight around the trunk of a tall rustling tree in the silence of the yard.
    The next morning was bright but too cool for the lake, so he did what he’d said on the highway would sure feel great: he lay on a blanket in the grass.
    Well before noon he was getting up to stretch every twenty minutes or so, aiming a congenial smile at Janice in case she happened to look up from the garden, and going inside to pour a quick, deep shot of whiskey which he downed like medicine at the kitchen sink. Several times, when the drone of Tommy’s transistor radio in another room seemed to guarantee that he wouldn’t be seen, he had two or three.
    After lunch he took a nap; when he awoke very late in the afternoon he struggled heavily up to sit on the edge of the bed and called Janice, and she came to sit beside him.
    “Look,” he said. “I know you were planning to spend a few more days up here, but I want to go home tomorrow. The thing is I’ve got to get back to the office.”
    “Well, it’s hardly a question of ‘got to,’ dear,” she said. “George Taylor can wait.”
    “Of course he can wait. It’s not him, it’s me. I just think the sooner I get back into a normal working routine the better I’ll be, that’s all.”
    He knew he couldn’t expect her to say “You know best,” or anything like that, but at least she didn’t argue. She studied the leaf-mottled rectangles of sunset on the floorboards for a while; then she patted his knee and said “All right.”
    He was in the kitchen, fixing the first of what he vowed would be his only two drinks before dinner, when he heard her announcing the change of plans to Tommy. “Dear, Daddy and I’ve decided to go home tomorrow. You won’t mind that very much, will you?”
    And Tommy said he didn’t know; he didn’t care.
     
    “Well, hey, stranger,” George Taylor said, lumbering around his big desk with his hand held out. “Janice said you might be laid up another week.”
    “Yeah, well, you know how the flu is; sometimes it hangs on, sometimes not.” And Wilder allowed his knuckles to be crushed in welcome back to work.
    “You did a great job in Chicago; got some good reports on that.”
    “Well, that’s – fine.” But it was strange, too: he could remember almost nothing of Chicago.
    “Like to go over some of that stuff with you today; then there’s a couple new things coming up. You free for lunch?” He was back behind the desk now, punching one of the many buttons on his complicated telephone. “Honey,” he said, “Mr. Wilder ‘n’ I’ll be wanting a table for two at Rattazzi’s, twelve thirty. Right.”
    And so at twelve thirty they presented themselves to the headwaiter in the upstairs room, who called them “Gentlemen” like Charlie in Bellevue. The martinis here came in stemmed glasses, but the stems were only an inch high and the glasses as deep as tumblers. Well before George Taylor had finished hisfirst it was clear that he’d grown bored with going over the Chicago stuff and the new things coming up: as his voice trailed away in incomplete sentences and his eyes wistfully roved the crowded tables he seemed bored with the very idea of
The American Scientist
, with advertising, with business and with money itself – and who could blame him for that?
    He was fifty-six and burly, with a healthy crop of red hair just beginning to turn grey. As vice-president in charge of advertising sales he had risen as high as he