John D. MacDonald

The Obvious Woman

He walked all the way down the beach as far as the inlet, wearing his old tweed jacket, wondering how long it would be before the three of them — his wife, Mary Agnes, and his son, Jimmy, and the girl Jimmy was going to marry — would notice that he was gone.

The sea wind was cold and carried gray scud low over the coast. The three-day blow had scrubbed the stones and the brown sand clean, and he saw one Sunday surf caster, hardy and remote, in the distance. Terns huddled inshore against the wind, and the sea came smashing in.

At the inlet he wandered back toward Rickevy’s Boat Yard and stood out of the wind in the shelter of a shed and lighted a cigarette. He looked at the Gay Lady. She was winter-stored on the old timber cradle, the slicks out of her — forty years old and more, broad and heavy in the beam, mahogany and teak and white oak, with enough auxiliary power and fuel capacity to be almost a motor sailer.

Then he saw the ladder against her and the power cable running aboard. He frowned and looked toward the parking area. Gretchen Barker’s little green car was there. His impulse was to go right back to the empty beach. But he had to face Gretchen sooner or later, and this might be the best lime and the best place.

He walked through the yard to the Gay Lady and rapped on the hull. Gretchen came out of the cabin and looked down at him and said, with no expression on her face, “As I live and breathe.”

“How you, Gretch?”

“Come aboard.”

He climbed the ladder and stepped over the rail and followed her below. She wore a gray sweater. Her jeans were bleached by sea and sun, shaped to the roundness of her young figure. Her hair was smooth and tan, an odd shade not quite like sand, not quite like coffee with cream. Her face was slightly weathered, as befits a blue-water girl.

She had a small heater rigged in the cabin. Drawers and cupboards were open, cardboard cartons strewn around. He sat on a bunk. She sat on her heels beside the litter and pushed her hair back and looked at him with a kind of mocking defiance. “This old crock,” she said. “It’s like an attic. It’s like emptying out an attic.”

“A sudden urge to be neat?”

“I’m selling her.”

“Gretch!” he said, dismayed.

She stared at him. “What concern is it of yours, Mr. Robbins? I’m selling her because I don’t need her.” She turned back to her cartons for a moment and then gave him a tired smile and said, “I’m sorry. Why should I take it out on you?”

“I wish you would. I wish you could, Gretchen. I swear we didn’t know it had happened. I saw you on the street a few times. I thought you acted odd, but I didn’t know anything about it, and neither did Mary Agnes until Jimmy brought this girl home to meet us.”

She pulled an old shoe out of a drawer and looked at it. “One TopSider, faded and raggedy. Would fit a twelve-year-old girl. Not much utility here, friend. Out you go. Boyd, I grew up on this old crock. According to legend I was nearly born aboard her, but Daddy brought her in through a heavy fog.”

“That’s the way it was.”

She pushed her hair back again. “She was my inheritance, in lieu of money. I guess my family had a lot of things in lieu of money.” She stared at him thoughtfully. “I’m glad you didn’t know. I couldn’t have stood the idea of Mary Agnes going around saying her precious son had finally broken off with that obvious and unsuitable Barker female. He did it four months ago. In November. With two terribly reasonable letters and a very calm and reasonable phone call. From me he got hysterical letters and frantic phone calls. I didn’t handle it very well, Boyd.”

“I wish I’d known you were having such a lousy winter, Gretch.”

“What could you do? I got very Camille for a while. It works better than a diet. Then I got indignant at myself. And energetic. Aunt Tildy must have thought I’d lost my mind. Likewise Doctor Traub. I reorganized his whole filing-and-billing system. I cleaned the cellar and the attic and painted the spare room, started a night course in astronomy and joined a bowling league.” She made a face. “Therapy.”

She look some charts out of a drawer and reached in again and found a sealed bottle. “What do you know! Barbancourt. A liqueur rum, it says. Haiti. It’s been aboard at least twelve years.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” he said. She broke the seal, got stainless-steel cups and poured a few ounces in each. She sat opposite him on the other bunk. They smiled and clanked the cups together. A gust of March wind made the old hull of the Gay Lady creak.

She smiled and said it was fine rum, and then her eyes went strange and she said, “What’s she like?”

“Nancy? She’s a girl. Pretty, Southern-social, rich and, I suspect, very well organized. I don’t know her very well, and I have the feeling I never will.”

“It’s set for June?”

“A high noon in June. In Atlanta. One of those dynastic affairs.”

“You don’t have to look so jumpy, Boyd Robbins. I’m not going to break into tears. Golly, when I think of that three-day argument we all had. over two years ago, I almost want to laugh. Remember?”

He remembered. Jimmy and Gretchen had a thousand dollars saved. Jimmy was twenty and Gretchen was twenty-two. They wanted to get married and take off for a year in the Gay Lady, down the Waterway and across to the sunshine islands of the Caribbean. Boyd had been in favor of it. Mary Agnes had fought it. certain that if Jimmy took a year off he would never go back and get his law degree. She thought it a stupid, romantic dream and was certain Gretchen had talked Jimmy into it. After two days Boyd had slopped trying to change his wife’s mind. And then Jimmy had quit, and that meant Gretchen had to give up too.

“Now that you’re a venerable twenty-four, Gretch, would it have been such a good idea, really?”

She looked at him calmly. “I could have made him do it, you know, in spite of Mary Agnes. And I should have. Forgive me, Boyd, but it was the last chance in this world your son had to escape being a stuffed shirt.”

“Do you still love him?”

She scowled into her drink, then looked abruptly at him. “No. I’ve done a lot of thinking. I loved what he was and what I thought he could become. But he isn’t what he used to be, and he isn’t going to become what I thought he could be. Oh, he’s an adequate human being, and he’ll be a fine lawyer, I’m sure. But somewhere he stopped being the guy for me to spend my life with. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough, Gretch.”

“Do you think we should have had that year?”

He leaned back a little, out of the glow of the overhead light. “There isn’t enough magic to go around these days. I wanted you for a daughter. You kids should have had that year. You should have taken that chance.”

She propped her small, firm chin on her fist and stared at him. “Do you want to really know why Mary Agnes fought it so hard?”

“I guess because you never quite fit her image of a—”

“Boyd, it was you and me. We always got along too well, right from the very beginning, when I was a little kid coming over to play. You never patronized me. There was a lot of closeness and a lot of trust. Sometimes it was as if it was you and me against Jimmy and Mary Agnes. She knew that if I married Jimmy it would be three against one. She’s strong and clever and selfish, Boyd. I hate her!”

“Now, really—”

“Two jolts of this here fine rum. sir, and I can say some things I probably shouldn’t say, if you’ll let me. I respect you for being loyal to Mary Agnes, of course. But wouldn’t you say you are… well, a very successful man?”

“I’ve been lucky.”

“When you go into the city, a lot of people scurry around trying to keep you happy, don’t they?”

“It’s sort of a reign of terror.”

“I’m serious. You have important friends all over the world, and when you say something, the newspapers report it. Isn’t Mary Agnes aware of all that?”

“I guess she thinks I’ve run some kind of a bluff and the whole structure might collapse any moment.”

“To her, darn it, you’re fumbly old helpless Boyd Robbins. Doesn’t she know you’re rich and famous because you’re so darned bright? Do you really hear the tone she uses when she speaks to you in front of other people? As if you were a dog that shouldn’t be on the rug. Boyd, she’s a tiresome, trivial, empty woman, and… and she gives you no honor!”

He picked up the bottle and put a little bit more rum into each cup.

“I have no right to talk to you like that,” Gretchen whispered.

“Maybe you do. I want you to understand. I want your respect. That should give you some rights. Listen, nothing is going to change Mary Agnes. And she does get on my nerves when I see too much of her. So I don’t see too much of her. If there is a problem in Seattle. I go solve it myself and do it better than the man I might have sent. So, in that sense, credit her with my success, Gretch.”

“But now you have it, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Boyd, doesn’t a man have to have honor from some special person? Doesn’t he have to work for some person who’ll keep telling him he’s great?”

He stared at her with a sudden and bitter surprise. “Do you want to know something hilarious, girl? For years when I’ve done some difficult thing and been proud of it. I’ve told you about it — in my mind. And you have beamed upon me and told me I was great. You see, you were my second time around. Through Jimmy. But ever since he said he was bringing a new girl home I’ve known my little game was over. It’s taken something away from me. I’ve felt restless and sort of out of focus ever since— Hey! Don’t! Please don’t, Gretch.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I can’t help it.”

“Let’s try ironic laughter, dear.”

“Ho, ho, ho,” she said, and sobbed aloud and bowed her head.

“I used to even feel guilty about it sometimes,” he said wonderingly. “I wondered if — being so very fond of you was an entirely good thing — liking the way you look and walk and react to things. Liking what you are.”

“Please shut up, Boyd. Please.”

“I looked at the three of them in my living room before I went out to walk on the beach. They all have blue eyes and narrow faces and clean skin. Their mouths all curl the same way. They talk so politely to each other. I love Jimmy. If he knew I felt sorry for him he would never be able to understand.”

She put her cup aside and pushed her tan hair back with both hands and said despairingly, “Will you stop!”

“I wanted to tell you these things. I can stop. Yes.”

“Maybe it’s the talk. Maybe it’s the rum or the weather. I think I’ll tell you something, Mr. Robbins. And we’ll all have some nice hollow laughter.”

“Tell me what?”

She made an ugly mouth. “Something I’ve denied a thousand times since November. It’s really quite a common psychological phenomenon.” She leaned toward him and spoke with a cold precision. “I was seven when Daddy died. Did you ever stop to think, sir, that your son was just a substitute for what I really wanted?”

He stared at her. His mouth went dry the moment he understood what she was saying.

“But I’m old enough to be—”

“Ten thousand other people would say that, Boyd. And snicker. You’ll be forty-four on the third of July. I’ll be twenty-five on October sixteenth. When I’m forty you’ll be fifty-nine. Do you want the whole neurotic routine? All the wicked dreams? You could quit working, and there’d be enough for us and enough for Mary Agnes too. I’m sure she would adore Atlanta — and martyrdom. Off in the Gay Lady then, Boyd, for a year of stars and talk and sailing, and then I… then I’d start filling this old crock boat with healthy babies for you. And I would always — love and honor and respect… you… because you… you are good!” She dropped her head into her arms and began to howl.

Shaken, he spoke her name and put his hand on her shoulder and snatched it away as hastily as if he had burned himself. He tried to comfort her. After a long time the crying slopped. She got up and found a towel and wiped her face. She tried very hard to smile at him. “What did they put in that rum?” she asked.

“Truth serum?” he said. He looked at her and knew he would never again see her as a girl. This was a woman.

“I’m a mess,” she said. “And now I’m so ashamed. Please don’t stare at me.”

“I’m sorry. I was thinking I’m just now getting acquainted with you.”

“Don’t bother, Boyd. The whole thing is impossible. You better lake off. You better make a strategic retreat to home and fireside. Run from the dangerous female. Not dangerous — just sort of silly. And I have to clean this craft for market.”

He stood up. He was a tall man, and there was not quite enough head room below decks for him. They smiled at each other with excessive courtesy. They both started to speak at once and slopped, each waiting for the other. Then with a long, gliding step she came into his arms. It was very awkward. He felt shocking guilt. They could not get their arms right, and their noses were in the way. Suddenly the guilt was gone, and it was right. She was no longer Jimmy’s girl, Jimmy’s ex-girl, Jimmy’s anything. She was his Gretchen, sweetly, sensuously alive. Then she took a great breath and wrenched herself away and tumbled headlong onto the bunk. “Go ’way!” she yelled. “Get off my boat!”

He went down the ladder on weak legs. When he reached the shed he looked back. The sky was a dark gray, and night was moving in. The ports of the Gay Lady glowed with orange light.

He leaned against the shed for a little while. The vision she had given him was as romantic as the look of the yard at dusk. Shuck the old life and the old wife. On with the new. Find all the old visions and dreams.

It is the special penalty of the middle years, he thought, to know that even the wildest impulse leads to the commonplace. Youth, in its innocence, can truly believe itself unique.

But what a dream this one is, he thought. The golden girl and the tropic seas under a moon like a huge pewter plate, with hot days and hard work to firm the office flesh, brown the hide, cleanse the eye. And there she was, fifty yards away, examining, just as he was, this longing which had been so suddenly and unexpectedly wrenched out into the light, perhaps wondering, just as he was, how much self-deceit was involved. Can this timeworn man and this vibrant girl find happiness as they sail off into the sunset? he asked himself bitterly. Well, for two or three minutes back there it was a nifty idea. He walked to the dark beach and turned toward home.

Going in the back way, he noticed that the Mercedes was gone. There were lights on in the kitchen, but none in the rest of the house. He tossed his old tweed jacket onto a kitchen chair and wandered into the big living room. The fire was down to a few embers. Suddenly, startling him, a table lamp at one end of the couch clicked on. Mary Agnes had been sitting there in the dark. Her features seemed bunched in the center of her face.

“You cruel, selfish, stinking thing,” she said in a low, grinding voice.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I knew you’d try to act innocent. You try to humiliate me in every way you can think of. You try to spoil things for me. You really hate me, don’t you?”

“What is it this time?”

“As if you didn’t know! How do you make that lovely, lovely girl of Jimmy’s feel at home? You brood in a corner, and then you leave without a word to anyone. You knew we were taking them to the club for dinner. I sent them along, naturally. I didn’t know when you’d be back or what condition you’d be in. You prowl around in those ratty clothes looking like a bum, and you do that to humiliate me too. Jimmy and I get very sick and tired of having to make excuses for you.”

“She seems like a nice girl.”

“And they’re leaving in the morning.”

“Honey, I flew in from Houston to meet her, and I have to go back there tomorrow. And it is still my intention to have dinner with them at the club tonight and be a genial father of the groom.”

“You’re in no condition to go.”

He stared at her and then laughed. “No, you don’t, Mary Agnes. You could make ammunition like that last forever. I’m going, and you better come along because it would look strange if you didn’t.”

She stared at him, her mouth slightly open. “You laughed at me!”

“You look ready to go. I’ll change. Better phone them at the club and tell them we’ll be right along.”

“What were you laughing at?”

He took a shower and shaved and dressed with the efficiency of a man who has spent half his adult life in hotels and learned to reduce basic tasks to simple routines. He looked at himself in the mirror and decided he was far too eroded a knight for the shining Gretchen. After the June wedding, when Mary Agnes was less tense, a summer cruise with her might be a good idea. He had gone stale recently. The mistakes thus far had been small ones. Mary Agnes was all right. Just a little irritable.

When he was ready to go, he found her in the kitchen. He stopped just inside the door, as abruptly as if he had run into a wall of glass. Obviously she had not heard him coming. He saw her with such a terrible clarity that she became someone he did not know at all. The clock of all the days and years seemed to stop. Her face was red and shiny and intent. With the heavy kitchen shears, straining at the tough fabric, she was chopping his old tweed jacket to fragments. He could hear her breathing. She seemed to be killing something. She cut the last piece in two, let the fragments fall to the floor and dropped the shears on the counter.

“Have you lost your mind?” he asked.

She whirled and stared at him. The red faded out of her face. Then she smiled. “Just try to rescue it this time,” she said. “Just try! I’m going to do that to all your bummy clothes. The men in my family never left the house unless they were immaculate. I’m just not going to let you continue to humiliate me, Boyd. Shall we go?”

He picked up a piece of the jacket.

“What are you going to do?” she asked. “Break into tears?”

“Not exactly,” he said.

He didn’t know just what he would do. If he did not go to the club he would be in for months of punishment. And he had laughed at her. He saw a strand of pale, tan hair on the lapel of his chopped-up jacket, caught in the heavy Irish tweed. As long as we must have symbols, he thought, it’s nice to have a complete set. He picked up the dozen pieces of the jacket and piled them on the counter.

“What are you doing? Put it in the trash.”

“Let’s be off,” he said, smiling.

At the club he sat comfortably back inside the nest of himself and with mild interest watched himself release upon his son and the girl and the woman all the charm and alertness he had used on all the strangers in all the far places. He was sensitive to them, aware of their response, bringing them into a glow of talk and laughter, handing them their cues deftly.

The children went off to find some music, and he took his wife home. She kept telling him how nice he had been, how astonishingly, extraordinarily nice, until somehow she had turned the compliment into a criticism of all the other evenings of their life.

When they were in the living room he interrupted her by saying her name with an odd force and inflection.

“Yes, dear?”

“Mary Agnes, I’d like you to go gel that jacket you ruined and sew it back together for me.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. It doesn’t have to be invisible stitching. It doesn’t even have to be wearable. But go get the pieces and sew them back together, Mary Agnes.”

She was wary. “It certainly didn’t lake you long to spoil this evening too, did it?”

“It might be important.”

She hesitated for just a moment and then laughed. “For goodness’ sake, don’t pout like some stupid little boy. That coat was ratty. I did you a favor.”

“I just want to be certain. You won’t make the effort?”

“Absolutely not! What do you think I am?”

“All right. We’ll drop it.”

“Why you should ask me to do such a—”

“Good night, my dear wife.”

Jimmy married his Atlanta bride on the twentieth of June. On the twenty-second Boyd Robbins went to one of the big commercial boatyards, accompanied by Hal Foreman, one of his most trusted young executives. A man from the yard showed them through the Gay Lady, It was the first lime Boyd had seen it since it had been overhauled and refurbished. The man was very enthusiastic about all that had been done to the old craft.

“It’s nice to get a go-ahead for a really total job, Mr. Robbins. It’s a good piece of money, sure, but I’d cast off in a minute to lake her around the world.”

Boyd admired it appropriately, the new suit of sails, heavy-duty generators, new auxiliary, navigation aids, stainless-steel galley, new hardware. He thanked the man and sent him away and sat in the main cabin with Hal Foreman.

“She couldn’t trace who really bought it?” Boyd asked.

“Not a chance.”

The hull moved in the breeze, nudging the fenders, creaking the lines.

Foreman looked uncomfortable and said, “Boyd, is it any of my business?”

“That’s hard to say at the moment, Hal. You couldn’t help guessing. I haven’t seen this boat in three months. Or the lady. And I haven’t decided anything worth telling anybody. Maybe the Sea Scouts will get this, Hal, and there’ll be nothing to tell. Or maybe an awful lot will change, if so, you’ll be the second to know. I’m going to stay here for a little while. Take the car along. I might not come back in today. I don’t know yet.”

Foreman hesitated and then unexpectedly shook hands. “Boyd, whatever, whenever, however… I want the luck to run good for you.”

Foreman went topside, stepped onto the dock and left quickly.

Boyd opened the canvas bag he had brought aboard. He took out the three texts on seamanship and navigation and put them on the cabin table. He had been reading them for three months, on airplanes, in terminals, in hotel suites. The rules of the road. “Red right returning,” he murmured.

He look out two stainless-steel cups and put them beside the texts. He took the bottle of Barbancourt and poured an inch of rum into the cups. He could look out through one of the ports and see the public telephone fifty feet away. She would be working at the doctor’s office for another sixty-five minutes. He leaned back in the chair, sipped the rum and listened to the beating of his heart.

This was decision time, and he had sixty minutes. This is the way you do it. You expose yourself to all the pros and cons, and you hold back until the deadline is inescapable, and then they all balance out, and you know. The big answer always comes in two sizes. Yes and no. Yes or no. With regrets but no remorse either way, because you put yourself right into the scales with everything else. And you watch which way they tip.

They never balance perfectly. There is always some small object that makes the difference. Such as a frayed shoe without a mate, of a size to fit a girl of twelve. Or a leather-covered button rolling across a kitchen floor.

He had had to make many difficult decisions in his life — some patiently and cautiously, when there had been time; others hastily and instinctively. Some had been right, some very wrong. For this one he had only an hour — a short time — and he must not be wrong.

Content

John D. MacDonald
The Obvious Woman