Extreme Magic by Hortense Calisher Read Free Book Online Page A

Eunice began to give trouble. Before that, their double ménage had not been particularly unusual—almost all the households of couples their age had been upset in one way or another, and theirs had been more stable than many. During the war years Eunice had had plenty of company for her midweek evenings; all over America women had been managing bravely behind the scenes. But now that families had long since paired off again, Eunice showed a disquieting tendency to want to be out in front.
    “No, you’ll have to come home for good,” she said to Grorley, at the end of their now frequent battles. “I’m tired of being a short-order wife.”
    “The trouble with you,” said Grorley, “is that you’ve never adjusted to postwar conditions.”
    “That was your nineteen-forty-six column,” said Eunice. “If you must quote yourself, pick one a little more up-to-date.” Removing a jewel-encrusted slipper-toe from the fender, she made a feverish circle of the room, the velvet panniers of her housegown swinging dramatically behind her. She was one of those women who used their charge accounts for retaliation. With each crisis in their deteriorating relationship, Grorley noted gloomily, Eunice’s wardrobe had improved.
    “Now that the children are getting on,” he said, “you ought to have another interest. A hobby.”
    Eunice made a hissing sound. “Nineteen-forty-seven!” she said.
    In the weeks after, she made her position clear. Men, she told him, might have provided the interest he suggested, but when a woman had made a vocation of one, it wasn’t easy to start making a hobby of several. It was hardly much use swishing out in clouds of Tabu at seven, if one had to be back to feel Georgie’s forehead at eleven. Besides, at their age, the only odd men out were likely to be hypochondriacs, or bachelors still dreaming of mother, or very odd men indeed.
    “All the others,” she said nastily, “are already on somebody else’s hearth rug. Or out making the rounds with you.” Worst of all, she seemed to have lost her former reverence for Grorley’s work. If he’d been a novelist or a poet, she said (she even made use of the sticky word “creative”), there’d have been more excuse for his need to go off into the silence. As it was, she saw no reason for his having to be so broody over analyzing the day’s proceedings at the U.N. If he wanted an office, that should take care of things very adequately. But if he did not wish to live with her, then he could not go on living with her. “Mentally,” she said, “you’re still in the Village. Maybe you better go back there.”
    Things were at this pass when Grorley’s paper sent him to London, on an assignment that kept him there for several months. He was put up for membership in one or two exclusively masculine clubs, and in their leonine atmosphere his outraged vanity—(“creative” indeed!)—swelled anew. Finally, regrettably near the end of his stay, he met up with a redheaded young woman named Vida, who worked for a junior magazine by day, wrote poetry by night, and had once been in America for three weeks. She and Grorley held hands over the mutual hazards of the “creative” life, and on her lips the word was like a caress. For a woman, too, she was remarkably perceptive about the possessiveness of other women. “Yes, quite,” she had said. “Yes, quite.”
    When she and Grorley made their final adieu in her Chelsea flat, she held him, for just a minute, at arm’s length; “I shall be thinking of you over there, in one of those ghastly, what do you call them, living rooms, of yours. Everybody matted together, and the floor all over children—like beetles. Poor dear. I should think those living rooms must be the curse of the American family. Poor, poor dear.”
    On his return home in June, Grorley and Eunice agreed on a six-months trial separation prior to a divorce. Eunice showed a rather unfeeling calm in the lawyer’s office, immediately