An Officer and a Lady Read Online Free

binds. I was a half-and-half mixture of Benedick and Lothario, and I was never able to decide which I admired the more. My convictions were impregnable. Women, I agreed, are the most delightful creatures in the world; I would rather be an S.S. than a Ph.D. any day. But no woman should ever tie me down to the “where have you been” thing; no woman should ever rope me in to teach me the hateful mysteries of a four-room flat; no woman should ever—
    Then it hit me.
    It happened in a little village not more than fifty miles north of Albany. I’d made a bum sale to the only furniture firm in town, and had gone out to Blank’s house for dinner and to spend the evening. The first thing I saw when I entered the parlor was a little blue angel sitting at the piano.
    “Who’s that?” I asked my friend.
    “My cousin,” said she, “from Burlington.”
    We went into dinner almost immediately, and for the first time in my life I felt indifferent in the presence of food. The cousin sat across the table from me. I’m no describer, but I’ll try to give you an idea of how she looked. She wore something blue with little bunches of lace at the wrists and neck. Her hands were so white they made her pink fingertips look almost red. Her eyes and lips seemed to belong to a sort of mutual benefit society. I never saw such perfect teamwork. They teased and trembled and tempted, and yet all the time they kept saying: “Never—absolutely never. We’re having a lot of fun, but we will never—”
    “You will!” I said aloud.
    “You will what?” my friend asked coldly. She had been watching me. I was too busy to answer.
    After dinner I walked out on the front porch alone. My eyes felt funny and I couldn’t swallow. All over my chest it felt like someone was sticking needles in me and pulling them out again. I started down the steps, sat down on the top one, and began to review my past life. Then I jumped up and started to walk up and down the porch.
    “Frank Keeler,” said I, “you’re sick. Your stomach’s out of order. It’s even possible that you’re drunk. But don’t you dare to tell me—” I clenched my teeth hard—“don’t you dare tell me—”
    Then I went back into the house and sat and listened to her eyes for three wonderful hours.
    We were married in September—the 28th, to be exact. At that, I kept my word. She didn’t tie me down or rope me in. It was all I could do to get her to hold on to the rope after I tied it around my own neck. Before she’d even look at me, I had to admit that without her my life would be devoted to the joyless gloom of unrelieved masculinity.
    We took a thirty-day wedding trip to Florida, then came to New York and rented a Harlem flat—she calls it an apartment. By that time my firm was sending me daily hints to the effect that although marriages may last forever, honeymoons don’t; and on the Monday following I left on a trip upstate. My wife’s mother had come down a day or two before for a long visit, so it wasn’t as though I was leaving her all alone among strangers.
    In the short space of four months I had backed up, turned around and started off in the opposite direction. You’ve read how “in that one brief moment was condensed the experience of years, and from being a happy carefree girl she became suddenly a mature and resolute woman.” Well, as a quick-change artist “she” didn’t have anything on me. I had become the most faithful and devoted husband south of the North Pole.
    In this, you understand, I was serious—darned serious. If I thought you’d know what I mean, I’d say I was an extremist. Of course I don’t claim any originality; many a man has called the Venus de Milo ugly because she didn’t look like his wife. But usually it’s merely a disease. With me it amounted to a religion. And there wasn’t any forcing about it, either; the thing actually seemed to agree with me. The worst of it was, I liked it.
    As I say, soon after edging into a