FullReads

They dined out more and more as spring drew on and the warm weather set in. The neighbourhood now was aglitter with eating places of all sorts and degrees, from the humble automat to the proud plush of the Sheridan Plaza dining room. There were tea-rooms, cafeterias, Hungarian cafes, chop suey restaurants. At the table d’hote places you got a soup, followed by a lukewarm plateful of meat, vegetables, salad. The meat tasted of the vegetables, the vegetables tasted of the meat, and the salad tasted of both. Before ordering Ray would sit down and peer about at the food on the near-by tables as one does in a dining car when the digestive fluids have dried in your mouth at the first whiff through the doorway. It was on one of these evenings that he noticed Cora’s hat.

“What do you wear a hat for all the time?” he asked, testily.

“Hat?”

“Seems to me I haven’t seen you without a hat in a month. Gone bald, or something?” He was often cross like this lately. Grumpy, Cora called it. Hats were one of Cora’s weaknesses. She had a great variety of them. These added to Ray’s feeling of restlessness and impermanence. Sometimes she wore a hat that came down over her head, covering her forehead and her eyes, almost. The hair he used to love to touch was concealed. Sometimes he dined with an ingenue in a poke bonnet; sometimes with a senorita in black turban and black lace veil, mysterious and provocative; sometimes with a demure miss in a wistful little turned-down brim. It was like living with a stranger who was always about to leave.

When they ate at home, which was rarely, Ray tried, at first, to dawdle over his coffee and his mild cigar, as he liked to do. But you couldn’t dawdle at a small, inadequate table that folded its flaps and shrank into a corner the minute you left it. Everything in the apartment folded, or flapped, or doubled, or shot in, or shot out, or concealed something else, or pretended to be something it was not. It was very irritating. Ray took his cigar and his evening paper and wandered uneasily into the Italian living room, doubling his lean length into one of his queer, angular hard chairs.

Cora would appear in the doorway, hatted. “Ready?”

“Huh? Where you going?”

“Oh, Ray, aren’t you fun-ny! You know this is the Crowd’s poker night at Lil’s.”

The Crowd began to say that old Ray was going queer. Honestly, didja hear him last week? Talking about the instability of the home, and the home being the foundation of the state, and the country crumbling? Cora’s face was a sight! I wouldn’t have wanted to be in his boots when she got him home. What’s got into him, anyway?

Cora was a Wilson Avenue girl now. You saw her in and out of the shops of the district, expensively dressed. She was almost thirty-six. Her legs, beneath the absurdly short skirt of the day, were slim and shapely in their chiffon hose, but her upper figure was now a little prominent. The scant, brief skirt fore-shortened her; gave her a stork-like appearance; a combination of girlishness and matronliness not pleasing.

There were times when Ray rebelled. A peace-loving man, and gentle. But a man. “I don’t want to go out to eat. My God, I’m tired! I want to eat at home.”

“Honey, dear, I haven’t a thing in the house. Not a scrap.”

“I’ll go out and get something, then. What d’you want?”

“Get whatever looks good to you. I don’t want a thing. We had tea after the matinee. That’s what made me so late. I’m always nagging the girls to go home. It’s getting so they tease me about it.”

He would go foraging amongst the delicatessen shops of the neighbourhood. He saw other men, like himself, scurrying about with moist paper packets and bags and bundles, in and out of Leviton’s, in and out of the Sunlight Bakery. A bit of ham. Some cabbage salad in a wooden boat. A tiny broiler, lying on its back, its feet neatly trussed, its skin crackly and tempting-looking, its white meat showing beneath the brown. But when he cut into it at home it tasted like sawdust and gutta-percha. “And what else?” said the plump woman in the white bib-apron behind the counter. “And what else?”