Three Short Novels Read Online Free Page B

lobby, she underwent a constant shifting of emotions. Her curiosity about the men who passed through the lobby or who came into the shop to buy gifts for women was chastened by her own need for fidelity, a yearning for her husband, and this shifting itself was exciting, a constant tremor of the heart.
    She felt, at this time, estranged from her son. She had hired a woman to take care of him, and the woman, Olga, lived with them—a spindly, aging woman with gray and orange hair and dark grape lipstick, who, because of an intolerance for racket, could not work in the shipyards, one among a few women, as she said of herself, not making a fortune sorting rivets and counting bolts. With no husband around who was generous with the child, as George had been, Vivian lacked the example. With no husband around to devote herself to, she had no desire to devote herself to anyone. She was with David only an hour or so in the morning and in the evening, and the impatience with him that had always been present now declared itself only as an uneasy deafness to his small, complaining voice and his screams of joy; since she was not so bound to him, she no longerfelt so impatient with him.
    She began to stay away evenings, serving as hostess at a U.S.O. center for soldiers and sailors. She enjoyed dancing with them, the change of bodies against hers, the many strange bodies responding to the strangeness of hers. Some of the men were appealing to her, the appeal of the few made stronger by the presence of the many. Teresa, her cousin, whose husband was also in England, took men home with her, but, for Vivian, taking a strange man to bed for one night was like taking a first step into that freedom which she preferred to titillate herself with rather than experience. Every day she wrote her letter or added to an unfinished letter. She wrote that she loved him, and she was sure that she did, but as she wrote her words of love, she imagined all the things he would condemn her for if she did them.
    She was asked to supper one evening by her father’s mistress, Adele, who had telephoned her at work, and, on entering the apartment, saw a young sailor stand up from the couch. The lamps, as usual, were dim, and in a moment’s time she took a dislike to the laxness of his body, to the lazing pleasure the body took in its attractiveness. When he shifted weight, at her approach, from one foot to the other, an ungainliness in his legs, an overgrownness of his body, revealed him as Paul. Adele, sitting on the floor, her legs crossed, hugging an ankle with one hand and holding a wine glass with the other, jokingly introduced them as if they had never met, and they laughed with embarrassment, their laughter and voices sounding to Vivian like that of a couple who have always wanted to meet. Although, after he had left her, she had not known anyone who had meant as much to her, there was now no desire for him, only a superficial excitement. Adele served a feast despite the rationing, telling them it was done with mirrors and spices, and presided with a wide-gesturing charm that declared this young man her favorite brother and that denied she had ever ranted against him for his abandonment of his wife and child. He dawdled his fingers overthe linen cloth, the arm of his chair, the silverware, as if his sense of touch had become more acute now that he was in the perceptive presence of two women who called for sensitivity; it was flattery done with gestures. He told them of his tribulations in New York; he had got a small part in a musical and found his legs rather heavy to dance around on; and with the closing of that show he had spent a year in Nassau as a companion for a very old and very wealthy man, but he had tired, he said, of reading his employer Alice in Wonderland every night, and then he laughed, apparently realizing Vivian was no longer naïve, that she might even have become more worldly than he and that his leaving her had contributed to