John D. MacDonald

The Men Women Marry

His wife said, “Your attitude is unnatural.” Walter Tyler knew how unanswerable that statement can be. Perhaps at this same breakfast moment, countless husbands were groping for a meaningful retort. But there was none. Obviously, wives wanted natural husbands. Nice, neat, natural husbands, each one with a windup key in the small of his prefabricated back.

He said helplessly, “I just don’t like him.”

“You have to face facts. Kath is serious about him and he is serious about her, and she very probably will become Mrs. Carl Paine. He’s a sweet, polite, intelligent, ambitious young man. Did you like that musician better?”

“Lord, no!” he said fervently.

“You have an emotional block,” she said. “It’s a natural paternal reluctance to lose your only daughter. So you tell yourself you don’t like him. Exactly what don’t you like about him?”

“I’ve told you before, dear. He’s just — too darn’ plausible. Too perfect. He hangs on my every word. He calls me ‘sir.’ He keeps hopping up to do this and that. He’s got salesman manners.”

“He’s selling himself, isn’t he? He wants us to like him. That’s normal, isn’t it?”

“Yes, he’s selling us, and maybe he sold Kath the same way. I tell you, angel, I just don’t know the guy, and I can’t seem to get to know him. I can’t seem to get beyond that attentive politeness of his.”

She gave him a familiar look of sweet sadness, with an additive of exasperation. “Well, hurry up or you’ll be late. And come right home tonight. There’ll be just the six of us at dinner. I want you here before Ralph gets here.”

He groaned and said, “Do we have to have Helen and Ralph?”

“Kath kicked about it too, but Helen is your sister, and Ralph is her husband, and they ought to meet Carl. It’s the sort of thing you do.”

“Maybe after an evening of Ralph, Carl Paine will head for the far hills,” Walter said.

“And break your daughter’s heart? Don’t be unnatural.”...

Walter Tyler got home as early as he could, grimly anticipating the evening with Kath and her young man, and his sister and her husband.

Ralph, as usual, would be the problem. Ralph Mason, his brother-in-law, was a big, meaty man with a big, meaty voice. He was, beyond any doubt, the most positive man in the world. He had a vast assortment of opinions and stated them in a way that was at once so positive, so heedless of the possibility of disagreement, that the listener felt a compulsion to disbelieve. When Ralph turned his heavy face and his boiled eyes toward you and said, with utmost dogmatism, “The sun will rise tomorrow” — said it harshly, imperiously — you found yourself wishing it wouldn’t. Ralph had perfected a defense against contradictions. He simply refused to notice them.

By the time Walter came downstairs, Carl Paine had arrived. Paine gave Walter his quick firm handshake, smiled his white-toothed smile, called him “sir” and succeeded, as always, in making Walter feel socially inept, falsely hearty and incredibly elderly. When Kath looked at Carl, there was a glow in her gray eyes that disheartened Walter. He wondered if Kath really knew this poised young man.

Ralph and Helen arrived and introductions were accomplished. While Walter served the drinks he kept a chill eye on Carl Paine. It gave him a certain gloomy satisfaction to note that Carl’s attitude toward Ralph Mason was just the same as his attitude toward his girl’s father. To Walter that seemed shocking duplicity. After thirty seconds with Ralph, most people acquired a look of strain — of emotional rebellion, tinged with disbelief. A reckless few tried to interrupt or contradict the oracle. Yet Carl Paine listened almost eagerly, nodded in the right places, even laughed on cue — which sounded odd, as Ralph generally laughed alone.

Dinner was as deadly as Walter had expected. Kath interrupted her frozen smile only for her fork. The hostess had her mind on the mechanics of the meal. Helen ate cheerfully; Walter guessed it had been years since she had listened to Ralph. Carl Paine was the eager audience of one. But Walter thought that Carl’s eyes were beginning to look a bit glazed.

After dinner they moved into the living room for coffee. Walter sat, drugged by the words that went on and on: “...wrong with the health of this nation today. All this ridiculous attention to vitamins, calories, diets. Young man, let me tell you that there’s no reason in the world why anybody should ever go on a diet. If you’re naturally heavy, you’re naturally heavy...”

Walter eased quietly out and went upstairs, shaking his head, hearing Carl’s polite murmur of agreement. He went through the guest bedroom at the head of the stairs and into the bathroom. He looked at his face in the mirror with an odd sense of relief. After a few hours of Ralph Mason you began to get the idea that you had turned purple, merely from restraining yourself.

Then he heard the familiar creak of the top stair. He glanced in the mirror and saw Carl Paine walk slowly into the guest room. The young man’s shoulders, usually so erect, were seriously slumped. He sighed audibly.

Walter felt guilty. He knew he was spying and yet he was intensely curious. Carl Paine sighed again. He moved over toward the dressing-table mirror. Suddenly, surprisingly, he leaned forward and made a face at himself. For a moment Walter wondered if the young man were harmlessly insane. Then he saw the puffed cheeks, the goggling eyes, and realized that Carl was doing an inept imitation of Ralph Mason.

“And I say it’s so because, by golly, I say it’s so,” Carl said, in imitation of Ralph’s ponderous tone.

Walter knew he had to announce his presence. He coughed. Carl Paine whirled, blushing. He tried to take out a cigarette but dropped the pack, reached down for it, missed it, finally fielded it and straightened up, all his composure gone. “I’m... I’m sorry,” he said. “Did you hear?”

“Don’t sweat, Carl. He’s pretty rough to take.”

“Kath tried to give me the word, but I didn’t realize... Look, Mr. Tyler, please don’t think I was being wise or anything. I—”

“I guess you needed a break. I did.”

Carl grinned. “My face feels stiff from smiling. Doesn’t anybody ever give him an argument?”

“Once. You know, I used to try to imitate him too. You can’t do it. There’s only one Ralph. For some reason unknown to man, my sister married him. Stranger yet, she seems happy.”

Carl grinned again, still a bit shamefaced. Walter was glad to see that the gloss was gone. And under the perfect manners was a likable guy. They looked at each other with new understanding.

At that moment Kath stuck her head in the door and hissed, “There you are! You better come back down. You can’t hide like this. It’s... it’s unnatural!” She went quickly down the stairs.

Walter said, “Back to the tractor factory, Carl.”

“Wait until I adjust my young-earnest-audience look,” the young man said.

They grimaced at each other and went downstairs. Walter knew it would be all right now. It was more than the agreement about Ralph. It was the mutual shouldering of a social burden. Carl Paine was a new member of the club; together they had suffered the unanswerable accusation of being termed “unnatural.”

They walked into the living room, into the booming cadence of Ralph’s dissertation on the benefits of getting up at six every morning. Father and potential son-in-law smiled politely, with just the merest garnish of guilt.

Mrs. Walter Tyler looked searchingly at her husband, and at Carl Paine. She sighed warmly and looked over at her daughter and winked. Kath knew precisely what her mother meant.

Content

John D. MacDonald
The Men Women Marry