Free Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick Page B

European palace, situated about two miles from the business quarter, and containing a large theater or opera-house...”
    Another teacher of women. You haven’t read Gibbon? How is that possible, you with such fine legs?
    Alex’s thin, flat hand pressed mine and the last strains of male coquetry played out with noticeable effort. Elizabeth, Elizabeth. You never gave me a chance.
    Oh, indeed.
    He was in a rout, mutiny in his camp. Not marrying, keeping his “studio” for the crippled book on architecture, for love affairs, for definition of self—all destroyed by a sudden delinquency. Sarah had left him.
    And not only that, he went on. It was scarcely a few weeks before she was married. You can elope like a junior miss, no matter how old you are, if you are not in need of a divorce.
    His long alliance, fifteen years, with the nervous, insistent, infatuated woman from Philadelphia—Sarah, who believed in the sacred book and in the hollows of his Oriental face, who was possessive, dominating, and in her plain, stubborn concentration, like the concentration of someone bending over a dangerous machine, perhaps a little mad. She came upon simplicities the way others came upon debts, naturally—and so baked tedious home-made bread, cooked dim soups from fresh vegetables, and stitched up her dresses out of Pakistani bedspreads. Still there was something cheerful and blinkered about these reductions. They were character, like her clear smile, clear teeth and the way she had of taking an editor aside and saying, Give him a deadline, do you hear? That will do it.
    You have grown a little beard, I said.
    You see it is not true that one can’t change.
    And how meek he looked decorated by the gray tufts. Yes, of course, he had begun at last to look like a family man, like one who is half of a couple and carries hidden from the world all the arguments behind the neat public smiles of appreciation, who falls in panic from the height of accepted marital discontent and yet is pleased to find a pillow as he lands. Monogamy drifted about him—the scent of a hot iron on a shirt collar. A bourgeois, thinking of retirement, of planting trees, of storm windows, of tiresome journeys by car that are pleasant to remember. Odd that all of this clung to him just when he was at last a true bachelor.
    Disgusting, he said. Only those women with money can violate the laws of probability. And no matter what they do it will make sense. It is either a regression or a rebirth.
    Sarah had taken a trip to Philadelphia, on the train. Her story was short indeed. That was the grandeur of it. On the train she met an old friend of her parents—the revered parents. She met the friend, elderly, rich, careful, widowed. And what a glance of patient conservatism the old friend must have cast upon her history, her sacrifices, her inclination for service.
    The splendid old gentleman, trim from his long daily walks, spare from the salt-free cuisine of his Irish maid, sprang forth at her with the call of blood, leapt at her throat with memories of the pack and the clan. How I adored your mother. It’s a wonder there wasn’t a scandal... Your father was a national treasure... Dogs remembered, old partners in many teams of tennis doubles, people dressed in white with long, thin legs like wading birds.
    Sarah turned her love and attention to the old man immediately . What style, Alex was shouting. Immediately ... You ask how she took my surprise?... Pure sullenness...leaden sullenness...
    And why not, Alex? It is well known that women carry poison in their pockets. Did you expect a gun? A woman with a gun would be just another policeman. We fall in love with the convicts, remember that. Policemen marry girls from the neighborhood; high school looms over their unions, the first uniform is her prom dress and his black bow tie and white shirt. But the girls are thinking of poison, thinking of poison as the lights go out on the dresser where the revolver has been placed