screeching on the telephone pole near the house. It was amusing (Shakespearean, she said) to hear to-whit, to-who in the night. Fletcher regarded the owl as an enemy. A city man who had learned to live with crickets and night birds, he could not tolerate the mockery of the raucous tones. In the pause between the cracked cries, Fletcher lay tense, waiting for the unbearable repetition.
Elaine kissed him with many small kisses, touched and teased in a way that would once have aroused superior power. “Be patient, darling.” In aborted groans Fletcher cursed the earth and heaven, himself, the owl. “Try, darling, to relax. Just a bit longer, dear.” Into Fletcher’s mind hobbled the memory of a boy whose unequal arms trembled, whose drawn legs jerked at every step. Sick at the sight of deformity, Fletcher had admitted the poor cripple to his office to offer an unsteady tray of pencils and shoelaces. A dollar had brought tears to the animal eyes, spittle had caked loose lips while, gulping and winking, the poor fellow had spewed out gratitude. Fletcher’s generosity had been the easy penance of a healthy man. He did not like to remember this, but the spastic ghost came to haunt him during those fragile, important moments when he could least afford to be tormented by memories.
“Patience, dear.”
Her voice was like a breeze sweeping his cheek. A man’s patience could not hold forever. Her whispers grew fainter, endurance flagged, the owl hooted. Worn and disgusted, he left her.
“Sorry, darling.”
The owl hooted again. “Damn you!” Fletcher cursed the owl because he could not curse a wife who pretended the failure was her own. She had no right to remorse. Alone in his bed he thought of Elaine alone in hers, and became resentful of her suffering. Had she been older, less lusty, merely performing her duty toward the husband who kept her, he would not need to have tortured himself with the concern of her. He lay and listened to the faint stir of her restlessness, heard the click of a light switch, the sound of running water, the clatter of a cupboard door.
Neither slept much. At half-past seven on New Year’s Day Elaine found Fletcher in the den with a cup of instant coffee grown cold at his elbow. She wore a smile. “Oh, darling, you’re writing in your diary.”
He covered the page with his arm.
If she had noticed the gesture of concealment she gave no sign of it. “You’ll enjoy keeping a diary,” she said, finding some pleasure in his using her gift. “Don’t have any inhibitions. About anything. Just put it all down, your craziest notions. Later when you read it over, you’ll find it terribly amusing.”
Elaine had a lot of favorite words. The way she emphasized and thrust them at him sometimes annoyed Fletcher. He found amusing a reproach. A man who could not satisfy nor be satisfied ought, at least, to be amused. His first entry would never amuse anyone:
Happy New Year, Fletcher J. Strode. Oh, yeah. A lousy lot you have to be happy about. Just another 365 days to wonder about what FJS is doing here. I would be a lot better burning down there and so would my wife. She knows it. I know it. God knows it. She is getting to despise me and I do not blame her for it. I would not blame her for anything she might do.
“What have you written?”
He looked up sheepishly. His eyes, in spite of all that he had gone through, were still childishly wide and blue, fringed by lashes that women remarked upon enviously. His wife laughed at the secrecy, swooped down to kiss him. His covering the diary did not displease her because she felt that Fletcher ought to have something, if only the diversion of recording secret thought, to reawaken the spirit of that vital and impetuous man with whom she had fallen so vitally and impetuously in love.
IT WAS NOT that love had died. Quite the opposite. Circumstance had reshaped their lives and emotions. Elaine had become softer, more mature, in many ways, maternal; Fletcher more dominating and willful. He had to possess her fully. She was the ether and the substance, the strength and the ornament, the reason and despair of his life. In this lay their tragedy.
Five years earlier, a hearty man of forty-two, Fletcher J. Strode had fallen so profoundly in love that he felt that he would die unless he won the darling creature. At this time Fletcher had been boisterous, given to impulse and high living, easy laughter and hard work. In Elaine Guardino he had found more than a desirable girl. She had, as he had, a madness for living, spent her energy and her earnings with a zest that had been due not simply to youth but to a freedom of spirit which he had never before found, nor expected, in a woman.
At the time of their marriage all of their friends had predicted early disaster. An unlikelier couple could not be imagined. There was a difference of nineteen years in their ages; their tastes were incompatible; every element of character, background, and education was dissimilar. Her friends considered him the stereotype of the self-made man, a show-off who expressed himself by conspicuous spending and loud talk. His cronies were sure he would never be able to live contentedly with a highbrow who talked about ambivalence, Shostakovich, existentialism, and Martha Graham.
They met in New York at Sardi’s restaurant after a play opening. One of Fletcher’s associates had invested money in the show. Elaine had come with a young actor who had a minor part. The place was thronged, too many people crowded on the banquettes along the walls. Perhaps it was for the benefit of the graceful girl beside him that Fletcher Strode boomed out startling, boastful statements; perhaps it was not an accident that upset a bowl of marinara sauce over her dress.
His apologies had been overwrought. While waiters dabbed at her with hot water, she had tried to comfort her unhappy neighbor with assurances that the dress was unimportant, inexpensive, and would probably come back from the cleaner’s good as new. Fletcher had not asked her to send him the cleaner’s bill. This would have been too mean. Instead he had found out that she was a photographer’s model, Miss Giordino, traced her address, and sent a new and costly gown. She had refused to accept it. Her dress, she told him on the telephone, had come from a cut-price shop, the spot was almost invisible, and he was too, too generous. They had argued for half an hour, and she had finally agreed to discuss it with him at dinner.
“Is your name really Elaine?”
“Why shouldn’t it be?”
“Elaine, the fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat.” He had offered this proudly. Tennyson’s poems, like Emerson’s essays, had been a chore for him in school.
She told him that her mother had been working on illustrations for a children’s edition of The Idylls when she met Professor Guardino. “It was a pickup. At the Tate. Mother had gone to London to study the pre-Raphaelites and set up her easel before Burne-Jones, and Papa was a refugee from Rome waiting for his American visa. He had thought of translating Blake into Italian and was looking at the lithographs. But he never did. Blake, I mean. He always said Mother took his mind off the project. You see, it was inevitable that they named me Elaine.”
Fletcher had not seen it at all. Her smile and the ivory pallor of her flesh, cheekbones, pointed chin, and her sweet habit of blushing made the names Tate, Burne-Jones, Blake, more important to him than the day’s stock market quotations. Fletcher Strode had never before met a girl who could be, at the same time, so refined and so lusty. Three weeks after he spilled the marinara sauce he had asked his wife for a divorce.
On the first date Fletcher had told Elaine that he was married, technically. His wife and daughter lived in an exclusive New Jersey suburb while he kept a bachelor’s apartment in New York. Mrs. Strode always explained that her husband was too busy in the city and too restless for commuting and added that his devotion never flagged. The truth was that they loathed each other. He gave her a good allowance and kept up the appearance of marriage to guard himself against designing women.
