Woman Aroused | Page 4

do everything right. Make this the one. Are you doing everything right? Darling, will we make a boy or a girl?"
Our days became a series of fights and we separated and she got a job as a bookkeeper for a smart dress house. It was the ideal job for Flo: it pleased her efficiency to handle a thousand and more details, and she was right in with the very newest styles. Her analyst thought it was the right job for her, and I suppose he really did her a world of good, although it was on his advice she got the divorce. In the settlement, she took the house, which only had one other tenant beside myself--the upstairs apartment that had once been the chauffeur's apartment (although we never had one; my father loved to drive the big car himself) was rented to a quiet old retired man named Francis F. Henderson. He'd been living there for years and paid eighty a month for his three rooms. I gave her the rent money, and took care of the house and paid the taxes for my rent.
For about a year after she finished her analysis I didn't see Flo--she was busy analyzing all her friends. Then we began having tearful and wonderfully tender reunions--and just as tearful partings. Our reunions always seemed to come when I was fed up with being lonely, began to think about girls too much, glance at the bra ads in the subway with more than admiration for the copy and layout. I had to see her every month anyway to give her the rent, so spending a few days together every other month seemed to do us both nicely.
When the disc jockey said it was three o'clock I decided I'd better call the coffee pot after all--I needed the nine dollars. I dialed the operator, told her I wanted a coffee pot--a restaurant--on the West side of Lexington Avenue, near 80th Street No, I had no idea of the name or street number. After a moment she gave me two phone numbers and the first one I dialed turned out to be the right one.
The counterman said, "One of my partners comes on now, so I was counting the cash. Soon as I saw I was nine bucks over, I says, 'I short-changed some guy.' Then I remember you because that redheaded ba--your wife--was dancing in the red coat and the drunk said..."
"What did the drunk say?" I asked.
"Never mind, he was drunk. You..."
"What did the drunk say? I'm curious."
"Mister," the counterman said, his voice soft over the phone, "I don't even know the drunk. He said something about her legs. Look, you call for the money in the afternoon, after three, that's when I come on."
"Fine."
"Don't worry, it's safe."
"I know that. And thank you." I hung up.
I took out my blending bowl and mixed some tobacco, lit my pipe. I felt badly: I wanted to wake up in the morning and have Flo next to me, hear her chatter as we read the Sunday papers, feel the good warmth of her body against mine. The damn house seemed too quiet.
I sat around, had another drink. Even my cat was out. Flo had her own place on 16th Street. Maybe by the time she reached there, she'd cool off, take a cab back. I could phone her but that would only start more talk. Besides, I wanted her to come back to me. (You're so right--I wasn't exactly a dilly to live with either.)
By four I went to bed but I couldn't sleep and by five I was too restless to even lie down--I could smell Flo's perfume on the bed. I got up, put on sweat pants and a red sweat shirt, wool socks and tap shoes, and went downstairs to dance.
The basement was a long room with a neat oil burner at one end. A mirror ran along one wall and the room was completely bare of any furniture except a phonograph with an automatic record changer.
When I was a kid we lived in Washington Heights in fairly comfortable circumstances. My father was a hard working plumber. He started manufacturing bathroom fixtures and the money rolled in. When he bought the big brownstone on 76th Street and this garage which went with the house, we weren't trying to move in society or put on the ritz. My folks liked the neighborhood and father considered the houses the same as money in the bank. I was about seventeen then and raised like a rich man's son. At Columbia I studied journalism because I had a vague desire to write and mainly because the title "writer" was a lazy catch-all that covered so many phases of life--most of them empty. By merely calling himself a "writer"