Stella took a pack of cigarettes from her bag, lit one and then silently offered the pack to Harold.
“I said, what’s the big idea? I had to drive twenty-five miles to get here.” He pushed the cigarettes away.
“It was your idea to meet, I believe. At least that is what you said on the telephone.”
“I meant at your house, goddamnit. You knew that.”
“And then I specified here. You did not have to come.”
“But I wanted to see you!”
“Then what is the difference to you whether we meet here or in Milburn? You can say what you want to say here.”
Sims punched the dashboard. “Damn you. I’m under stress. A great deal of stress. I don’t need problems from you. What’s the point of meeting out here on this godforsaken part of the highway?”
Stella looked around them, “Oh, I think it’s really a rather pretty spot. Don’t you? It’s quite a beautiful spot. But to answer your question, the point of course is that I did not want you to come to my house.”
He said, “You don’t want me to come to your house,” and for a moment looked so stupid that Stella knew she was an enigma to him. Men to whom you were an enigma were thoroughly useless.
“No,” she said gently. “I did not.”
“Well, Jesus, we could have met in a bar somewhere, or in a restaurant, or you could have come to Binghamton—”
“I wanted to see you alone.”
“Okay, I give up.” And he lifted his hands as if literally giving something away. “I suppose you’re not even interested in what my problem is.”
“Harold,” she said, “you’ve been telling me all about your problems for months now, and I have listened with every appearance of interest.”
Abruptly, he exhaled loudly, put a hand over hers and said, “Will you leave with me? I want you to go away with me.”
“That’s not possible.” She patted his hand, then lifted the hand off hers. “Nothing like that is going to happen, Harold.”
“Come away with me next year. That gives us plenty of time to break the news to Ricky.” He squeezed her hand again.
“Besides being impertinent, you are being foolish. You are forty-six. I am sixty. And you have a job.” Stella felt almost as though she were speaking to one of her children. This time she very firmly removed his hand and placed it on the steering wheel.
“Oh hell,” he moaned. “Oh hell. Oh goddam it. I only have a job until the end of the year. The department isn’t recommending me for promotion, and that means I have to go. Holz broke the news to me today. He said he was sorry to do it, but that he was trying to move the department in a new direction, and I wasn’t cooperating. Also, I haven’t published enough. Well, I haven’t published anything in two years, but that isn’t my fault, you know I did three articles and every other anthropologist in the country got published—”
“I have heard all this before,” Stella interrupted. She stubbed out her cigarette.
“Yeah. But now it’s really important. The new guys in the department have just aced me out. Leadbeater got a grant to live on an Indian reservation next term and a contract with Princeton University Press and Johnson’s got a book coming out next fall … and I get the axe.”
What he was saying finally reached Stella through her impatience with the sound of his voice. “Do you mean to say, Harold, that you invited me to run away with you when you don’t even have a job?”
“I want you with me.”
“Where did you plan to go?”
“I dunno. Maybe California.”
“Oh, Harold, you are being insufferably banal,” she exploded. “Do you want to live in a trailer park? Eat tacoburgers? Instead of moaning to me you ought to be writing letters and trying to find a new job. And why should you think that I would enjoy sharing your poverty? I was your mistress, not your wife.” At the last second she restrained herself from adding, “Thank God.”
In a muffled voice, Harold said, “I need you.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“I do. I do need you.”
She saw that he was working himself up to the point of tears. “Now you are being not only banal, but self-pitying. You really are a very self-pitying man, Harold. It took me a long time to see it, but lately when I have thought of you, I have seen you with a big placard around your neck which reads ‘Deserving Case.’ Admit it, Harold, things have not been very satisfactory between us lately.”
“Well, if I disgust you so much why do you go on seeing me?”
“You did not have much competition. And in fact, I do not intend to go on seeing you. In any case you will be far too busy applying for jobs to cater to my whims. And I will be too busy looking after my husband to listen to your complaints.”
“Your husband?” Sims said, now really stunned.
“Yes. He is far more important to me than you, and at this moment he needs me much more. So I am afraid this is it. I will not see you anymore.”
“That dried up little … that old clothes horse … ? He can’t be.”
“Watch out,” Stella warned.
“He’s so insignificant,” Sims wailed. “You’ve been making a fool of him for years!”
“All right. He is anything but dried up, and I will not listen to you insult him. If I have had an experimental approach to men during my life, Ricky has accommodated himself to it, which I dare say is more than you would be capable of doing, and if I have made a fool of anyone it is myself. I think it is time I retired into respectability. And—if you cannot see that Ricky has four or five times your own significance, then you are deluding yourself.”
“Jesus, you can really be a bitch,” Harold said, his little eyes as wide as they could get.
She smiled. ” ‘You’re the most terrifying, ruthless creature I’ve ever known,’ as Melvyn Douglas said to Joan Crawford. I cannot remember the name of the movie, but Ricky is very fond of the line. Why don’t you call him up and ask him the name of the picture?”
“God, when I think of the men you must have turned into dogshit.”
“Few of them made the transformation so successfully.”
“You bitch.” Harold’s mouth was thinning dangerously.
“You know, like all intensely self-pitying men, you really are very crude, Harold. Would you please get out of my car?”
“You’re angry,” he said in disbelief. “I lose my job and you just dumped on me, and you’re angry.”
“Yes, I am. Please get out, Harold. Go back to your little heaven of self-regard.”
“I could. I could get out right now.” He leaned forward. “Or I could force you to see reason by making you do what you enjoy so much.”
“I see. You’re threatening to rape me, are you, Harold?”
“It’s more than a threat.”
“It’s a promise, is it?” she asked, seeing real brutishness in him for the first time. “Well, before you start slobbering over me, I’ll make you a promise too.” Stella lifted a hand to the underside of her lapel and pulled out a long hatpin: she had carried it with her for years now, ever since a man in Schenectady had followed her all day through shops. She held the hatpin out before her. “If you make one move toward me, I promise you I’ll plant this thing in your neck.” Then she smiled: and it was the smile that did it.
He scrambled out of the seat as if given an electric shock and slammed the door behind him. Stella reversed the car to the restraining fence, changed gears and shot out across the oncoming traffic.
“GOD DAMN IT!” He pounded a fist into the palm of the other hand. “I HOPE YOU HAVE AN ACCIDENT!”
Sims picked up a stone from the gravelly shoulder and threw it across the highway. Then he stood for a moment breathing heavily. “Jesus, what a bitch.” He ran his fingers through his cropped hair; he was far too angry to drive all the way back to the university. Sims looked at the forest which began down the slope, saw the puddles of icy water between the trees, and then looked across the four lanes of road to the dry higher ground.