ALTHOUGH Otto and Esther tried their best to enter the hangover culture, they couldn’t quite manage it. By mid-morning, those of us who had lived through the night before had returned to something like our everyday charm, but under the influence of the same Bloody Marys that we were drinking Otto and Esther became as ebullient as all of us had been the night before, with the result that we could hardly look at them without laughing, because they seemed not merely drunken and ridiculous but exactly as drunken and ridiculous as we had been. It seemed like a generous, self-effacing gesture on their part, and we loved them for it.
AFTER A MIDDAY BUFFET DINNER, I read episode forty-eight of Dead Air, “The Lonely Housewife’s Friend.”
I INSTALLED my electronic eavesdropping device in Betty Jerrold’s bedroom because I couldn’t think of a way to install myself in her bedroom. A week went by before I heard anything at all. Then one night when I saw the light go on in the Jerrolds’ bedroom I dressed quickly, slipped out of the house, ran to the cave, where I had my listening post set up, scrambled inside, and turned the receiver on. It took a while to warm up, but as it did Mrs. Jerrold’s voice slowly filled my little corner of the cave.
“. . . leaking every time it rains,” she was saying, “but what do you care? You’re not even here most of the time.”
“What is this now? You’re annoyed with me for working? Do you want me to quit my job?”
“Oh, your job. Your job is — ”
“My job is damned hard work, Betty. Necessary work. And dangerous.”
“My job isn’t necessary? Raising your child isn’t necessary? I am the only one who is raising him, you know — not you. You’ve got me trapped in this little house — you’ve got me trapped in this little life.”
“You’ve got every comfort here.”
“Not quite. I don’t have a man in the house.”
“Oh, don’t you?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You seem to have your admirers — like the kid who sold you this piece of junk.”
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
“It seems to me that there’s something going on there.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. What gives you an idea like that?”
“I’ve got my reasons. Maybe I’ve heard something. Maybe I’ve got ways of hearing what you’re up to when I’m away. Maybe I’m not always away when I say I’m away. Maybe I’ve heard you and that kid — ”
“He is a boy, Roger, a little boy — not even a teenager. You’re being ridiculous.”
“Am I? Okay. Let’s try someone else. How about the delivery boy — the guy from Yummy Good Baked Goods?”
“Where are you getting these ideas?”
“I’m not a spy for nothing.”
“A spy! Oh! I forgot. You’re a spy. Mr. Spy. You want to know something, Roger? I don’t think you are a spy.”
“What?”
“I think you’re a salesman.”
“That’s my cover, of course — ”
“A door-to-door salesman.”
“A traveling salesman.”
“Door-to-door, traveling, used-car — what’s the difference?”
“The traveling salesman is the knight-errant of the salesman fraternity, while the door-to-door salesman has the image of a swindler, preying on housewives when their husbands are away, and besides — it’s only my cover.”
“Your cover,” she said, and I could hear the sneer. “It’s not your cover. It’s your life. I think you’ve been lying to me ever since I first met you. You’re no spy. Your glamorous spy life? — that’s your cover. Underneath it, you’re a traveling salesman.”
“I am a cold warrior, Betty, and what I do — ”
“I’m the cold one, Roger. You leave me here while you go out on the road, and you never can tell me what you’ve done or where you’ve been because it’s supposed to be a secret, but I think that the only one you’re keeping your secrets from is the woman you leave at home — me — a cold woman in a lonely bed — a traveling salesman’s wife.”
“And a door-to-door salesman’s slut.”
“Don’t you call me a slut.”
“Everything has its proper name.”
“Salesman!”
There was a silence, and then Mr. Jerrold said, more calmly, “Look, Betty, maybe I can arrange for a transfer to Europe or — ”
“Give it up, Roger. I don’t believe you anymore. You’re too boring to be a spy.”
“That’s the way the modern spy — ”
“Oh, shut up.”
“It’s just that you’re laboring under a common misconception — ”
“Will you please just stop talking?”
“I am a spy.”
“Shut up.”
“And a damn good one.”
A silence.
“Come on, admit it, Betty. You believe I’m a spy, don’t you?
Silence.
“Don’t do this to me, Betty.”
Silence.
“Just say it once, Betty. ‘You’re a spy, Roger.’”
“No.”
“Say it!” There was a sound that I now think was a slap. At the time, I thought it was some kind of electromagnetic interference.
“No!”
“Say it!” Another sound, muted, meaty. This, I knew even back then, was a punch “Say it!” Another punch.
There was a longer silence, then the rustling of bedclothes, and then Mrs. Jerrold said, “Don’t touch me, you bastard.”
“Come on, Betty — ”
“If you touch me again, I’ll scream.”
Mr. Jerrold sighed and said, “I guess you’re saving it for the kid across the street —”
“Go to hell.”
“ — and the bakery boy.”
“He’s not a boy, Roger,” said Mrs. Jerrold with a bitter laugh. “He’s a grown man. The lonely housewife’s friend. The kids all call him Mr. Yummy. So do I.”
There was silence, a threatening silence, and I leaned toward the radio, straining to hear, because I expected the silence to be broken by the sound of violence, but the silence lasted so long that I grew tired of listening and turned the radio off, so for all I know there was silence for the rest of the night.
AFTER THE READING came the quick exit. It was Sunday evening, and people had to be at work on Monday, so they gathered their things and said their goodbyes and crowded the launch and the runabouts, leaving us — all of us who stayed behind — to settle into that sense of impending disaster that’s known as the Sunday Blues, but Albertine whispered in my ear, and, giggling, we retired upstairs to savor the perdurable pleasures of our connubial bed.
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