Clem Anderson: a Novel by R. V. Cassill

Author:R. V. Cassill
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497685130
Publisher: Open Road Media

12

I LIKED CLEM’S NEW WIFE. I liked her without being prepared to, or without being prepared not to, I suppose, enjoying that neutrality of feelings that we bring to new experience after the exhaustion of wrestling with the dilemmas inherent in the old.

I had slept most of the day after my walk with Sheila. (M.L.A. meetings were in progress somewhere. Someone supposed I should have been attending them, and I would have gone to them, too, cool and interested, disjunctive as we all must be to survive, if I had had the physical strength.) It was just seven when I rang the Anderson bell on the seventh floor of a building in the east Eighties. A pretty gray eye appeared momentarily in the brass-ringed peephole of the door. I liked it.

With a swoop and a swish of her skirts Cinderella Susan swung the door open and, exclaiming, “Dick!” came lightly into my arms. I hugged her discreetly as if she were verily my old friend’s wife, pressed my cheek ritually to hers, enjoyed her perfume and with a delighted eye followed her down the long hall to their front room. What eye would not delight in following her? It simply seemed she hadn’t much to do with the burning riddle I had watched glow like a sign in the dark sky while Sheila and I walked toward Canal Street the night before. It seemed that this lively body, displacing air and reflecting light, hadn’t much to do with the teasing photographs and the commands to love in the magazines that had given me prior acquaintance with her.

“Clem’s been fighting a hangover all day,” she said in that tone of intimacy that assumed, quite rightly, both of us knew from of old just what part hangovers played in his life. “Poor old boy. I offered him a martini when I got up at three. He said, No, by God, he was going to fight it out in the clean and healthy way until you got here.”

“Tell him the reprieve has come,” I said.

“Oh, he’ll have heard the bell. He wasn’t asleep.” She chuckled, half to herself. “He’s lying in there brooding about his enemies. It does him good to have someone to hate.”

“He’s got new ones?”

“Oh …” If there were real troubles, she shook them off like water drops from her pellucid shoulders.

As she fixed me a drink, continuing to delight my eye with every movement and glad of it (as she had a right to be), I began to see her in the setting that Clem’s prosperity had given her. The apartment had an air of loftiness and homely spaciousness—not of luxury, but that nice thing, the democratic grace of the well-off to which our taste inclines so readily. There were a few good paintings on the wall, and wholesome spreads of bookcases. There were comfortable easy chairs that seemed to have been placed by need and love in the ample dimensions of the room. It was a home where

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