Harold's Affair

"Poor Son of a Bitch," you say. And certainly you're right – by psychiatric social worker standards. By the standards of Norman Vincent Peale and your local police court. By the whole tsk-tsk, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God juice in which our culture is being marinated. But maybe this character who has inspired your condescension is tsk-tsking about you, friend – if he ever bothers to think about you. This patchy citizen without visible or nonvisible means of support, without a friend, man, beast, or flower, to his name, and possibly without a name, who you see scuffing it up and down our hard streets, this passive creature of Salvation Army handout lines – maybe the sight of you in your necktie brings tears to his eyes.

His name is, or was, Harold Henry, and of course his story begins with the end of weaning, the birth of a sibling, the first time he caught his mother and father exercising their marital prerogative, or abusing it. But it's not for me to analyze – or romanticize. We can start with his move to the suburbs. When you asked Harold about his move, he invariably mumble-shrugged something about its being good for the children, but the quick glint in his usually soft dull eyes killed the fatuous phrase. There, behind the unfashionable steel frames, sparkled a secret joy that neither two hours and fifty minutes a day of commuting nor a leak-prone roof nor uncertain plumbing could quench. By removing his wife and three children twenty-one miles from the city, the suburbs were abetting Harold Henry's Affair.

Not, I hasten to add, that Harold had an affair going at the time, or as a matter of fact had ever had one going, unless you count a disorderly hour in the recesses of the stockroom with a temporary file clerk at the close of the 1952 office Christmas party. But Harold had been thinking about his Affair for twelve or fifteen years and had already made considerable mental sacrifices to it, including three successful suicides and innumerable unsuccessful but painful attempts, so that the move to the suburbs was for him simply another, quite minor tribute to his (continued on page 116)Harlod's Affair(continued from page 77) romantic life of the spirit.

As fate or parapsychology would have it, six weeks after the corporeal part of Harold settled in the pink and gray split level in Cloverdale, Marilyn Sprower took a job in the accounting department of Fabrique Handbags. Despite somewhat horsey features. Marilyn was a fine, large girl and Harold, whose reveries were usually derived from fleeting glimpses on the lunchtime street, soon found that it was Marilyn's lips that opened for him as he sat resting his eyes at his desk, Marilyn's formidable bosom that pillowed his head on the trip home to Cloverdale and Marilyn's ample behind that blocked all other vistas during the course of a day. Like many men who dislike their children, Harold had always left for work in the morning with a sense of vast relief and come through the weekends feeling like a lunatic. Now, with Marilyn filling Fabrique Handbags and the huge dream of Marilyn filling his mind, he switched to a morning train that got him to the office twenty minutes early and took to dawdling on the way home from the station, imagining that he was strolling hand in hand with Marilyn – who at these times resembled Simone Signoret, in trenchcoat – up the Champs and toward the back-street hotel where they would roll about wildly amid the wallpaper's lascivious cupidons.

As chief accountant at Fabrique, Harold was obliged to stay late one night a month to check inventory. In previous years his companion for these late hours had been a thin and aging man, of yellowish complexion and gravelly voice, no inspiration for working any later than absolutely necessary. But his assistant having finally faded away, it was, he realized as inventory night approached, Marilyn who would naturally remain at his side after the others had gone. Marilyn who would share his nocturnal labors.

In the week preceding The Night Harold's imagination worked as never before. There they were, he and Marilyn, unaccountably entangled as they climbed together the ladder to the upper shelves of merchandise; or Marilyn was falling from the ladder into his arms; or they were sipping daiquiris under Mr. Sochet's own desk (having first broken into Mr. Sochet's bar); or they were nesting in a mound of damaged goods. "Darling," Marilyn murmured huskily from among the rejects, "shouldn't you be going home, lest they suspect." But her tight hold on his hips belied her words and, with a reciprocal squeeze, he replied, "I often stay overnight in the city. That's the way the ball bounces when you live in the suburbs."

The Night came. Harold, in shirtsleeves, and Marilyn, in an entirely unsuitable frock that opened here and clung there, set to work. The Fabrique stockroom was narrow and crowded with boxes; it did not allow much standing room even for persons of more sensible proportions than Marilyn. As the taking of inventory involved a great deal of climbing and stooping and maneuvering, there were many slight collisions between the person counting and the person transcribing – Harold had never before realized how many. At each tingling brush, Harold felt the hair of his arm stiffen and leap toward the fuzz of Marilyn's. She was everywhere. He reached toward the white goods and his hand passed across her leg. He asked her to check a back number and when she bent over he lost count. He started up the ladder, remembered an item he had overlooked and turned suddenly back, and they were touching from chest to knees. "I think we should eat now," he said.

Marilyn had thought to bring sandwiches, and Harold had the daring to unlock the showroom. "We might as well sup in style," he said and giggled in spite of himself.

"I got salami and tuna salad," Marilyn said.

"The tuna will be fine."

"That's good." Marilyn delved fervently into her brown paper bag. "Personally, I don't dig mayonnaise. It don't agree with me. You know?"

In addition to six sandwiches on rye, Marilyn fished from the supermarket bag two quart bottles of beer and a bunch of bananas. "I dig bananas," she explained.

While Harold, never much of an eater, mused through one tuna sandwich. Marilyn finished off the salami and lay back in a contour chair that by no means matched up to her contours, the quart bottle in one hand, a banana in the other. "Hmmmm," she said, "it could be riper."

Harold poured a cup of beer for himself and sipped at it absently. He was observing Marilyn, and there was a great deal of her to observe. He followed the curve of her leg, the now-and-again impression of thigh against her stretched skirt, the softness of belly and heaviness of breasts, the mouth working around the banana. Her face became flushed and a veil drew over her eyes. "There's nothing like a little beer on a hot night," she said.

Harold grimaced as he sipped the bitter brew. He sensed that a Moment was at hand, but he lacked confidence in the Harold Henry that had to deal with the world. How many times he had been confounded by reality! But supposing it were not reality at all? The job of supposing at once restored his self-assurance. Supposing he had created this scene as he had so many others, and such delicious ones? What riposte would he toss off then to the woman in the contour chair? "I do hope. Miss Sprower..." He coughed and beer spilled onto his trousers.

"Whatdchya say?" asked Marilyn.

"If you just tell me how much this... repast" (he chuckled a little at the overstatement) "cost, I'll be pleased to..." "Aw, forget it," Marilyn waved away the debt with her beer bottle. "I ate more than you anyhow."

A moment's pause, and Harold adroitly changed direction. "How are you liking your stay with Fabrique, Miss Sprower?"

"Call me Lola," she said, sighed a sigh of enormous comfort and began to hum."You," oughta have a radio in this place, you know?"

"Yes," Harold chuckled, leaping into repartee. "Then we could dance."

"Hey, now that's what I call an idea." Marilyn put down the bottle, lifted her entire self from the chair and advanced on him. "C'mon, Mr. Henry, old boy."

"Marilyn..."

"Call me Lola."

Harold got home very late, but the next morning, after four hours of sleep, he felt marvelously refreshed. He hummed a few bars of The Boilerman Rock while shaving. It seemed to him at breakfast that he was exuding Marilyn's scent from every pore, and he hunched his way through the meal, talking away from Sylvia lest an odd glance or intonation or a breath from a mouth that was still rich with Marilyn's alert his wife's intuition.

"Did you have a hard time last night, dear?" Sylvia asked.

Was she being snide? Well, give her tit for tat. "Yes, unusually hard." He chewed on cardboard flakes. "May have to stay late again tonight."

"Oh, that's a pity. Are you sure?"

He chanced a look at her. "I was thinking I might stay over in the city. That slow late train... every stop..."

"Of course, dear. Just call me so I won't worry."

Harold left the house restraining a great desire to skip and whistle.

Sylvia waited until the car pulled out of the driveway, then went tremulously to the telephone. "Bert? He's going to be away again tonight. All night." She paused and smiled secretively at what came over the phone. "Yes," she said. "Yes. Yes. Yes." She hung up, looked whimsically at the breakfast table, whistled and did a little jig.

That evening Harold and Marilyn estimated their way through the remainder of the stock in record time and sped uptown to Marilyn's apartment, pausing only to pick up some pastrami sandwiches and a fifth of bourbon. "Bourbon weakens all my resistances," Marilyn reported. The apartment turned out to be a one-room walk-up. A small closet served as kitchen and a rather smaller one as bathroom. The walls were mottled, the furniture of the kind that seems never to have belonged to anyone in particular but, like some women (like Marilyn herself?), had been created to serve the transients of the world. Both windows offered a view of red brick and somewhere nearby ancient trains kept wheezing past – or maybe it was just the sound of the plumbing from other apartments. Conquering his first shudder of squeam-ishness. Harold established himself amid the faded flowers of an armchair and began to enjoy the sight of Marilyn leaning over a table to open a bottle of club soda. The apartment was casting on his affair a touch of the sordid that had been missing from his years of reveries, and he liked it.

And so the pattern was established. It quickly became understood at the Henry split level that owing to certain accounting innovations at Fabrique Handbags. Harold would have to work late once a week, generally on Wednesdays. Furthermore, it was accepted that since the late trains to Cloverdale were slow and ill-smelling, Harold would stay over at a hotel on these nights. The three children, who had never been certain of Harold's exact function in their family anyway, couldn't have cared less. As for Sylvia, she was very understanding; each Wednesday she packed a clean shirt for Harold and touched his cheek briefly on his way out.

For a month or more, it seemed to Harold that life. poor laggard, had at last caught up to his vision, that Marilyn had made his daydreams unnecessary. But then, one slow afternoon, it broke upon him that something critical was missing in his new relationship. His affair was not holding a candle to his Affair. True, Marilyn was a splendid girl, with the capacity for giving and, so far as he could gauge, receiving much pleasure, but she was not a person with whom one might seriously discuss suicide. The tragic element which had dignified his dreams, had raised them above the erotic imaginings of teenagers, was lacking. Also he was irked by the fact that each Wednesday he was sure to find waiting for him in Marilyn's walkup, the stub of a cigar in an ashtray, a partially filled bottle of somebody else's bourbon, even an odd article of male attire.

He resolved to bring a new dimension into their Wednesday nights, and at their fifth meeting he said, "Marilyn, you know I'm a married man."

Marilyn, lolling as usual on the hideabed that was never made, much less hidden, patted the space next to her. "Loosen your belt and make yourself comfortable."

He stood over her, and said, rather sternly, "I have three young children."

"Attaboy, Harry."

"Three children."

"It's OK Harry, it's OK. I take precautions."

"Between you and me. Marilyn, there can only be so much: we can only go so far. No matter how fiercely our emotions pull, I must remember my responsibilities. I will remember them."

She grunted.

"I am telling you this because the last thing I want to do is hurt you. We can only continue with one another if we accept the limits of what each of us can give, and never ask for what is beyond our means. I have my family..." He allowed a note of resignation to deepen his voice. "... for better or worse. And you must be free to go out: you must force yourself to see other men..."

"You bet your life, kiddo."

"You're young and lovely, Marilyn. I won't permit you to sacrifice your youth to one who can't ever give you more than a single night a week no matter what his heart cries to give you. You must not offer too much of yourself to one who..."

The telephone rang. Marilyn put down her nail buffer and reached over her head to pluck the receiver. "Hullo ... Oh, hiya Al. Whereya been?... Haw. You're a card, you know?... Well, I happen to be occupied just this minute, entertaining a friend... Yeah, it's busy too. Allame is busy. Tomorrow? Yeah, that'd be peachy. Haw...Don't worry about that. Just make sure you're in shape. Remember last time?...And, hey, don't forget the bourbon."

His tragic spirit having again and again been rebuffed by life in the form of Marilyn – oh, nonpareil form! – Harold attempted to regain the security of his fantasies. He conjured up many scenes that would once have been quite satisfactory. In one of them, for instance, Marilyn's lover, a hulking desperate-looking fellow with a scar, accosted him in her garbage-smelling hallway. "You rat," the lover muttered, and struck him in the face. Stoical Harold Henry's mouth gave the most subtly ironic of smiles while his nose hemorrhaged down his shirt front. Not bad, but no longer good enough for Harold. He was like a runaway slave who having found the outside world unendurable seeks once more the warm hearth of thralldom. But his brief freedom had confused him: he could not find his way back. And even if he had, he knew, his once-rejected, unforgiving master would only have kicked him out the kitchen door: After the years of happy meanderings through the lush, sweet-smelling woods of his imagination, Harold was faced with stark unfragrant reality.

"Well, all right!" he declared on his commuter train one morning, causing several persons to peep out from behind their newspapers. Well, all right, and better than all right! Here was the challenge he had needed all along – to bring the drama of his secret world to the attention of the world at large. He could not work out his life's tragedy on Marilyn, but he could use her to stir the others, all the others – or at least those who happened to be around.

He started his new campaign on a Monday by taking Marilyn to lunch. He took her to lunch again on Tuesday and spent most of the afternoon going by her desk on fictive errands and calling out ambiguous remarks loudly enough so that no one along the entire corridor of cubicles could miss them. "Say, Lola, how's your old Je ne sais quoi treating you this afternoon?"

"Hey," Marilyn said to him that Wednesday night, after a day replete with pats, pinches and obscene winks, "hey, you better cut out all the fiddling. You're gonna get your name in Dorothy Kilgallen if you ain't careful. You know?" Harold only smiled cockily. And on Thursday he grabbed her in public twice, once at the water cooler.

The following Wednesday instead of bedding down for the customary hours of dalliance in Marilyn's walk-up, Harold insisted on their going out to dinner. He took her to a small East Side restaurant near where he and Sylvia had lived before the move to Cloverdale. Any given evening between six and nine, he knew, several of their former friends and neighbors could be counted on to be in residence.

He greeted Anthony, the proprietor, loudly, and checked his move to show them to a discreet table in the shadows. "We'd like to see and be seen," he announced and nudged Marilyn toward the center of the room

"Whatcha getting at?" Marilyn asked uneasily. "You trying to give me a reputation or something?"

But a couple of bourbons later she was as merry as he had ever seen her, trading wisecracks with the businessmen at the next table and complimenting the waiter extravagantly on the bread sticks.Harold was delighted to notice that Dan and Peggy Schneider, a couple that had lived across the hall from him and Sylvia, were trying hard to make themselves oblivious to her performance. Peggy had been a particular friend of Sylvia's – and of the genre of friend that considers it a special mark of intimacy to be the first gravely to relay unpleasant news.

"Hi, Dan. Hi, Peg dear," Harold waved. The Schneiders smiled wanly back.

In the following days Harold was alert for any hint of a change in Sylvia's mood. He rehearsed throughly the dignified nod, the studied yet sympathetic impassivity with which he would accept tears, screams, imprecations, grim silences, the evocation of God or his three children. But he saw nothing. Again the next Wednesday and the next he paraded Marilyn into old haunts before old friends, but Sylvia remained as pleasant as ever. Each Wednesday morning she handed him his clean shirt with a delight that seemed some what extravagant for so simple a domestic duty. She appeared to be filling out a little, in flattering places, and was forever humming.

Nor were his fellow workers any more responsive. They were blind to his pinches and deaf to Marilyn's squeals. Each day his remarks grew coarser, his caresses more emphatic, but no one noticed. He might have assaulted her on the receptionist's desk and not an eyebrow in the building would have moved. The world was perversely bent on ignoring him. He might as well have been invisible. He probably was invisible. Despite Marilyn, despite the million heroic impulses that churned and bubbled in his breast, for the world he had never existed and still did not exist.

But he would, he vowed. "I will," he told Marilyn, "I will bash them, I will stun them, I will send them reeling."

"Please pass the hot relish, willya?" replied Marilyn.

On a Monday morning, after a numbing wet weekend with the children and with Sylvia whose sweetness had become entirely sinister. Harold knocked on Mr. Sochet's door. Sochet always kept his door closed because he was afraid that the office boy was trying to steal stock tips. The president of Fabrique, a jiggly, palpitating little man, an organism of allergies, suspicions, incipient ulcers and advanced neuroses, was afraid of everyone in his company, including his heir apparent, Randy Stark, whom he insisted share an office with him lest he be left alone to the mercy of his furies. At Harold's knock. Sochet blanched and grew rigid behind his desk. "The tax examiners!"

"What is it?" Randy called out bravely.

Harold threw open the door and advanced past Randy, toward the president's modest desk, situated catty-corner so that no one could slip up behind him. "Mr. Sochet," said Harold, puffing out his chest, "it has come to this."

"No requests for raises can be considered before the end of the year." Randy's dry, crackly voice intruded.

"Company policy."

"Mr. Sochet. I have deceived you, I have betrayed your trust. After more than a decade..."

Sochet gasped. "Randy, get the books checked...put a Pinkerton on him...quick, two elliptical yellow pills."

"How much did you get away with, Henry?" Randy asked as he ministered to his panting patient.

Harold proceeded with dignity. "Marilyn and I..."

"How much...to the nearest hundred?..." Sochet ripped at his necktie.

"Marilyn and I – and the fault lies all with me – are deep in...an affair." He shot the last words out and squared his shoulders.

"What's he saying? What's he trying to do to me? How much?" Sochet's face flushed and paled, flushed and paled, like a dying bar-and-grill sign.

"Marilyn and I – on company overtime."

"Hey, M.T.," Randy said, "I don't think it's money."

"Money!" Harold almost spat. "It was...infatuation...mad...insane..."

He spoke on and on, words pouring out of the cornucopia of his dreams.

Until Randy flicked his arm. "Hey, you're talking about Lola." Harold turned ominously, bare inches from the predatory face, "You mean your Wednesday nights, right?" Randy sucked at the stub of a cigar, and Harold saw them all again, the ashtrays full of cigar remnants next to the almost empty bottles of bourbon. "I got her on Tuesdays myself."

Harold swung out with a free-form backhand. He missed Randy, but Sochet, trapped behind his desk, flinched violently and struck his knee against an open drawer. "Fire him!" he screamed.

"You're fired," Randy mumbled, backing away. Harold swung again. Again he missed. Sochet fell off his chair, hit his head against the desk as he dropped, and passed out.

• • •

When Harold reached home that afternoon, Sylvia was waiting for him at the door, pale, fidgety, yet strangely buoyant. As she fumbled for words, Harold caught a glimpse of Bert Cellar, the Cloverdale dance instructor, ducking away from the living room door.

"Harold," Sylvia managed, after several false starts. "I am leaving you."

Harold smiled the ironic smile he had been practicing for fifteen years. It was a masterpiece, and he knew it. "Of course you are, dear," he said, turned about calmly and walked for the last time along the path which divided the lawn he hated. He did not even stop at the corner to look back.

Soon after, Marilyn was married to a buyer for a big piece-goods firm, who had for some time been her Mr. Friday Night. Harold sent a Hallmark Card to the couple, who moved to Chicago. Marilyn, having played her role brilliantly, thus exited on cue.

Well, that's Harold Henry. And so you still think he's the poor son of a bitch among us. But consider this, my friend. To how many of us is it given to live out our life's drama entirely, first, second and last acts? How many Hamlets and Lears have you bumped into on the morning bus? Oh, you and I are doing all right in our cool way – we'll never have to burn meals off the Salvation Army, and we can always weave our small dreams out of the stills in front of the neighborhood movie. But bepatched Harold Henry walks in the glory of his complete tragedy – job, family, everything sacrificed to his love, his faithless love. He is the daily insatiable spectator to his own catastrophe, and with each fall of the curtain, his refreshed spirit soars to where the Muses frolic. You and I, friend, who get drunk so we can make our dreary visit to the local whore, will merely live and die.