The Third Martini

All through the day curran's mind kept drifting from his work and he felt inside himself the feeling he had for-gotten for so long, the feeling he associated, when he thought of it, with youth, with being a young man, desper-ately and foolishly in love, and quite inexperienced, and love is a field in which the amateur is of no use whatsoever. How desperately and foolishly he had been in love with Anne.She had been the magical and beautiful girl for him as a girl can be only when you are young and all is wonderful and unknown and you first notice the tilt of her head and the lilt of lip, the turn of wrist and sway of ankle.It is utter sweetness and complete misery.

He had been twenty-one then, indecently old to be so innocent.He was on the point of speculating what life might have been had he been experienced, when he realized that was a waste of time.It was silly enough to be thinking about Anne at all.Had he disappointed her then as much as he had disappointed himself?

"It would be nice to think it isn't impossible," he thought.

As for his feeling, the feeling he had forgotten, a tightening of the stomach, a nervousness that was not a nervousness really, a tenseness that he had known so often with her when they had both been young.That, he thought, was love. Or a symptom of love. Or of infatuation. Or of passion. Or simple lust.

"Knock it off," he warned himself.If he were going to try to square his feelings with what the lady magazine psychologists said love was he would end up in an asylum.

Now here he was, thirty-eight and happily married and three children and a tightness in his stomach because a girl he had not seen for ten years had called him up.

"John told me where you were working," Anne had said in that smooth husky voice that had always reduced him inside to mush, "John Walters.Do you remember him? [Curran did remember Walters indeed, and his face tightened.A slick, fast handsome type he could well do without.] You don't think I'm forward for calling you up?"

"Your problem is, you were never forward enough," he said.

She had laughed.

"That was your problem," she said.

It was then, earlier that morning, that he had suddenly felt his stomach tighten.

Her laugh, and the sudden vision of her lovely gray-blue eyes, her warm soft lips, the way she walked – all that came into his heart.

And so, they had agreed, a couple of martinis after work, just for old-times' sake, because he was married and she would only be in the city a few days.

He had called his wife and told her he would be late – he had an appointment with a client at the Astor.

Now, there was a piece of folly for you.

while he could not claim he was without sin, he by no stretching of the truth could be described as a rounder – even if he were,he was aware that circumstances made it highly unlikely that he would go popping into bed with a girl he had not seen for ten years. Then why the lie?

He shrugged his shoulders.

He forced himself to work carefully through the day for he knew he could not trust his mind to be automatically correct, as he normally did, and he was still working at six-fifteen when his eye caught the clock.

"Christ," he thought, "late for my first date in ten years."

He put the work he would do at home into his brief case, washed quickly, looking suddenly anew at his face in a critical way that was not usual with him, and went down in the elevator.

The Biltmore was where he was meeting Anne. He rarely went there and was not known, his friends were the Commodore type. Of course, you never could be sure of not meeting someone – but why the hell was he worried?

He wasn't going to an assignation, but he was assuming all the worries of going to one. He would get Anne on the record when he got home, to clear up that end of the matter.

And, as he hurried through the sunlit streets, sunlit with the late-afternoon sun low in the sky, its light funneled through the cross-town streets, pushing through the homebound crowds, he felt again as he had felt when he was twenty-one and on his way to a date with Anne. The palms of his hands were sweating and he smiled a little as he remembered himself, years ago, standing on the porch of her home surreptitiously wiping the palms of his hands after he had rung the bell and heard her light, quick step coming toward the door, so his hand would be dry when she shook it.

"Like they say, you never learn," he muttered to himself.

What did he want here now, going to see Anne? He was not sure. Why the date? He did not know. Certainly it could be nothing in his life. He was happily married, he had a lovely wife, three fine children. He was not the sort to be searching for a mistress, that need was not in him, or if it was it was buried deep under the rest of his life so he never saw it.

But – and even as he thought he felt the tightness – Anne had been in his life, she was of the past. Why must he see her now again? To re-examine what had happened? Because nothing had happened? Was it that the love affair had been unfinished, was it so important that even now it had to be finished? Now he was wise enough to know they could not recapture it. Now he no longer believed in the poet's concept of love, the boy and girl who can love none but the other, who love though the heavens fall, who die for lack of the other's love. That was romantic but unreal, Curran knew.

He did not know why he was going to see Anne.

He checked his brief case at the Biltmore. So he would not have to hear he laugh – a gay laugh, true, but a laugh still – if he tucked his badge of life beside his chair?

He remembered, in the years past, that she was going to become a great actress and he – God, he'd forgotten. Doctor? No, architect it had been. Well, he was no architect and he didn't know whether she were an actress, and neither of them was "great."

Then there she was, waiting for him, sitting low in one of the low leather chairs of the cocktail lounge. He could feel his heart suddenly pounding as he wiped his right palm inconspicuously on the side of his trousers.

She half started to get up but the chair was too low and she took his hand and pulled him slightly toward her and he bent forward to kiss her; her lips were still as soft and sweet as he had remembered, but because of the way she was sitting and he standing it was not a satisfactory kiss.

They both laughed.

"We haven't improved our technique in all this time?" she asked.

"Well, the way I was standing—" he started and then halted, realizing he was explaining what need not be explained, just as he used to.

"Walt," she exclaimed, "you're blushing."

He sat down, recovering himself. After all, he was no longer twenty-one.

"Piffle," he said. "It's wonderful to see you. You look wonderful."

"You mean I haven't changed?"

"You've changed – but it's an improvement."

"How nice of you. My figure hasn't changed much, thank God. I still wear the same size dress. But if you look at me closely in a very bright light you'll notice a few lines that didn't used to be there. And I'm very, very careful about my hair. You're the one who hasn't changed. My God, what a relief to meet a man my age who doesn't have a tummy and who has his hair. I assume it is your hair and not a wig?"

"Pull," he said. "Martini?"

"Love one, I'll pull when I get out of this damned chair. I'm surprised this hotel doesn't have a rape a day, the way these chairs trap a girl."

Curran ordered the martinis and waited until the waiter came back before he said:

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"Well you. I haven't seen you for years, you remember."

"You first."

"I work. Not an architect. Airplanes, I'm—" he was about to say "I'm sorry to admit," and caught himself. "Married. Live in Ossining. Children, three. All boys. Excellent health. Fairly decent salary. Good prospects. Sedate suburban life with garden, two nights a month in New York with my wife, also every birthday and anniversary. Boys six, four and two. No more."

He took a long sip of his martini and smiled.

"You," he said.

She put her glass on the table and lowered her eyes. He saw the shadows of her eyelids and remembered how they had touched his heart, when he was young, with their ineffable, imaginary sorrow. When he had dreamed he wanted great tragedy to strike her, her to become a harlot or a murderess so he could take her in his arms and shelter her from the world or if they were killed share her damnation in hell.

"Nothing," she said after a long pause and raised her eyes again. She smiled a little but it was not her gay smile.

"What do you mean, nothing?"

Again she waited a little.

"I work. Not a great actress," her smile warmed and he knew that she had remembered. "A bit actress, and temporary public relations girl and model and hostess and whatever the hell else you have to be in Hollywood to live if you're a woman and not hard as nails or bright or sensationally pretty the way they want you to be. In other words, scraping along on the hundred-dollar-a-week average. Few prospects. Married, Married twice, to a couple of heels. No children. In New York on a hot tip about a job and fed up to here with Hollywood."

She finished her martini in a gulp, Curran signaled for two more.

"Sorry," she said. "Didn't mean to feel sorry for myself. Haven't talked like that in years."

Curran felt a wave of pity for her.

"Were you ever in love with me?" he said suddenly.

She waited again, a long while.

"Certainly I was, didn't you know that?" she asked. "You could have had me for the asking. Now why ask me?"

"It just occurred to me you'd hardly talk the way you've talked without that."

Again she waited and finally said:

"Would you like to know something else? I don't think I ever really got over being in love with you." She laughed, brief and low. "It's a lucky thing for you, my fine-feathered friend, that you're safe behind the bars of matrimony and I'm ethical or you'd have a slightly touched-up brunette after you (continued on page 138) Third Martini (continued from page 96) fang and talon."

"That would be nice."

She shook her head, let him light her cigarette and asked:

"Why didn't we? I assume your wife is a nice girl – the two – two types I got myself tied up with – why didn't I have the luck to have one of them be like you? Why didn't we?"

Curran waited while the waiter set down the martinis and decided to deal with only part of her questions.

"Because I was too young and you were too young," he said. "You don't get married till you get to the time for you and with us it was later. By that time you'd been to New York and were on your way to Hollywood and I'd come to New York and was making enough money to live on a half-time basis."

She smiled.

"It's still a pity," she said. "Do you remember— —" She stopped and smiled again. He watched the curve of her lips and she asked: "What do you remember?"

He thought a moment.

"Three things most," he said. "First was the afternoon I picked you up after that party." Watching her, he was terribly sad all at once, he thought this is nostalgia, I've never really known it before, to talk about things that once were and were so lovely, so bottomlessly sweet, and now are gone. "After that party," he said slowly, "it was a hot October day and you were wearing that low-cut dress. It was the first time I realized what lovely breasts you must have. And we went to that German place and ate Bratwurst and rye bread and drank beer. And we came out and the whole season had changed, as if the world had turned over. It was cold and the wind was blowing and it was starting to rain. I gave you my jacket and we turned the heater on in the car and it was pouring rain then. And we went and parked alongside the ocean and watched the breakers driving in. It was a lovely day. We never saw the night come, it was so gentle and imperceptible like the snow melting from a mountain field."

"Yes," she agreed.

"Then there was the night we went to that other place, the place they had that big stein of beer for a dime and we stayed there for hours and ate steamed clams and went back to your house – that was the night I think your father thought I seduced you."

"Quite correct," she said, "and if you'd been a little more astute you would have."

"And the third time was after the New Year's Eve party, when I took you home."

"That was the night," she said, "I decided there must be something wrong with me, I just wasn't physically attractive to men. I thought I'd better think about entering a nunnery."

"What a fool I was."

She put her fingers to her eyelids, closed over her eyes.

"What's the matter?" he asked. "I don't want you to cry, darling, I don't want to make you cry. Don't cry."

"Just thinking what fools we both were," she said. "How simple it would have been if we'd just gotten married and I got a job and we both worked--"

"Well," he said. He was thinking of adding "we didn't" but ordered two more martinis instead.

"Absolutely the last for me," Anne said. "I positively refuse to become a crying drunk. I have a rule against it."

"Last one," he agreed. "Me too."

"You feel like crying?"

"Slightly."

"I'm glad. I'm so tired of strong men who flex their muscles on the beach and never cry and have a character like warm Jell-o."

She smiled again as the waiter set down their drinks.

"Well," she said, toasting him. "The hell with all that. Right this minute, if you had never married and I asked you, would you marry me?" He hesitated and she went on, quite quickly, "I am now divorcing the last one. The first wasn't so bad, now that I think of him, he wastrying to be an actor and I wanted to be an actress and we hardly ever saw each other and little by little – you know, all the things of marriage that should have been there, like just coming home at eight and having dinner, weren't – little by little we got farther and farther apart and pretty soon we were miles away. So we got a divorce, I did, but he wasn't a bad guy. But the second – –"

"You never learn," he commented for the second time that day.

"How does a girl?" she asked bitterly. "You meet a guy and you want love, you need love, you wanted to be loved and to give it, he gives it to you, he says it will be forever and then it turns out he's strictly on the make, he thinks you have a better future than you do, he married you because he was in trouble with some married woman and her husband was high enough up so that he could have done something about it – –"

She stopped and Curran could think of nothing to say. He knew women were quick to see something in another wom-an to which he was utterly blind, he could do the same thing with other men, he know he could not tell her how or that if he did, it would make no difference. It was a gift, a sense, non-trans-ferable between the sexes.

He thought she had forgotten, then as if she were driving herself to some end he could not see she asked again:

"If right this minute, you had never married and I asked you, would you marry me?"

He had his mouth open to say yes, which was about as truthful an answer as he could give, which was what she needed, must deeply need or she would never have asked such a question. He could say yes and go home and that would be the end of it, like telling his son he could make the Harvard foot-ball team.

"No," he said.

He saw the sudden look in her eyes, the something, the unbelief, he saw her instantly gather her defenses. She smiled.

"Why, darling?" she asked, lowering her eyes so he could not see, and lifting her martini for a careful sip. "Because of the husbands?"

He would not admit why to himself for a long time to come and then it would be without pleasure and he would try to explain to himself he had done what he had done only because he too was in a dark trap from which there was no escape.

"No," he said.

"Because of the others?"

It was not that. The thought that other men had enjoyed her and he had not, hurt as she knew it would but it was not that.

"Yes," he said.

"Because that goddamned monastic upbringing or whatever the hell it was that turned you into a man afraid to take me when I ached for you and you must have known it, now it makes you hate me because you know I'm not ex-actly a virgin?"

"Not hate you."

"All right. But not love me, not think of me as a real woman, a whole woman, because I've done something that trans-gresses the way you think?"

He said:

"Honey, this is all theory. You asked me about marriage. I can't help being in love with you –" he added deliberately – "but if a man is going to get married – –"

"Don't finish that," she cried, so that the people at the next table looked at them and looked away.

They said nothing for a long time. She picked up her martini and finished it.

"Once," she said, "you told me you'd die for me," she smiled sweetly and continued without a break, "and now," she said, pushing herself up out of the low chair, "I think it would be nice if you paid the check and saw me to a cab and then went to Scarsdale or wherever the hell you live."

He paid in silence.

He saw her to the cab and as she settled herself in the back he leaned. He held the door open with his hand and said softly:

"Good luck on the job." She did not answer. "It's somehow a pity," he said quickly, "that you're the only girl I've ever desired, or loved, or adored the way I do you."

She turned her head away and when the driver looked back for instructions, Curran moved back and slammed the door and started for the station. He looked back, much later, when he knew the cab was out of sight. Now was she crying, he wondered? He was almost at the station before he remembered his brief case. He went back for it, now striding exuberantly. He was elated as though he had loved her and she had rejected him and he had taken his revenge.

But in only a few minutes, on his way to the station for the second time, he remembered her eyes looking at him in the cab, the tilt of her head as she turned away. He thought, I love her and now I have lost her. If the fact that your stomach is tense again within you means that you are in love, that is, and that would be in his life forever, that and the look in her eyes. Or maybe it was the third martini. As he walked he felt his eyes wet and he thought the third martini must be it. He wanted to run.

Why a client? Why a lie? He had absolutely no intention of anything except a couple of martinis. For one thing, even if he had been the sort of man who automatically made a pass at every pretty woman he met – and he was not: