Chapter 4: Well

Bill Pierce was not enjoying this July. Many representatives were on vacation. Of course, many doctors were on vacation, too. But representatives had their lists of doctors whom they saw, and getting the doctors actually at work covered by the representatives actually at work was a pain. To add to that, doctors often didn’t tell the representatives when they would be on vacation.

That meant that Representative X spent time going to Doctor Y’s office to find it closed. Or he went to the offices of Practice Z to find that half the doctors were out, and the other half had patients lined up who had already waited for hours. That didn’t give Representative X much time to visit the doctors whom a vacationing representative would normally see.

When Bill finally got out of the office and headed home, the streets were baking. The EL platform was blasted by a furnace-temperature wind. The car was supposed to be air-conditioned, but the weather and the heat from the passengers’ bodies defeated that. And the car was full of gossip about Watergate -- something about tapes and the White House. Had the Democrats been bugging the President while everybody was bitching about a few low-level peons exceeding their authority and bugging the Democrats? If so, the conversations he overheard didn’t turn on the Democrats as one would expect.

At least, it would be cool at home, and Carolyn would have cooked some good food. She always apologized for leftovers, but her cooking tasted good the second time around. No reason for her to slave over a hot stove on a day like this. But, when he got there, the apartment was empty. He hung up his suit coat and went looking for her. Almost always, she heard him come in, but she could be deep in her studies and miss anything. She wasn’t in the bedroom; she wasn’t in her office, and the place felt like a sauna; she wasn’t in the kitchen, and nothing was cooking there, either. There was no note, and the only message on the answering machine was a phone solicitor.

Well, with the way her office felt, she was smart to be out gathering information. They had his old air conditioner in their bedroom -- the new, larger one was in the living room window. Maybe they should buy another for Carolyn’s office. They weren’t made of money, but she wasn’t made of asbestos, either.

He worried about Carolyn. If something had happened, he might not know for hours. But, really, that was borrowing trouble. She probably was just late. He settled down to watch television.

The White House tapes were recorded on Nixon’s orders. Well, that was no huge problem. It was his house -- his office, really. You couldn’t tell how minor it was by all the talking, though. Partly, that was the newsmen making their best story of the day as exciting as possible. More, it was Agnew’s “Nattering Nabobs of Negativism” getting all the digs in they could at the President that the people had chosen over their dovish choice.

He turned off the set. There might be more news, but the programs wouldn’t cover it tonight. He headed for the refrigerator for a beer. Carolyn would swallow all this garbage. She was always ready to put the worst interpretation of what Nixon did. Where was the woman, anyway? It was late, and he was hungry.

When put the beer bottle in the garbage, he took down a glass and a bottle of bourbon. Normally, he saved the hard stuff for company, but this wasn’t a normal day.

The bottle was lighter when Carolyn finally came home.

“Sorry about this. Last interview of the day turned into a gold mine. Have you eaten?” She wanted to know whether he had eaten. He’d been sitting here worrying about her, and she wanted to know whether he’d eaten.

“Eaten what?”

“I told you that dinner would be meat loaf.” She was trying for a reasonable tone. She might have tried for some reasonable words, instead. An apology beyond a blithe “sorry about that” would have been a good start.

“You also told me that you’d fix it.” That was the bottom line. She’d said that she would fix dinner, and she hadn’t.

“Well,” she evaded, “I don’t expect you to be able to cook. That takes the ability to understand a cook book. I do expect you to be able to warm up two slices of meatloaf.” Now she was being patronizing. Pretending the issue was his intelligence and cooking abilities rather than her performance on her promises. And who had cooked the breakfast she’d eaten that morning? She’d never mention that.

“Look, I work all day and bring home a paycheck. I do some of the housework. We agreed that you’d have this year for your dissertation, but also that you’d take care of the house.” But agreements with Carolyn were only a basis for further negotiations. “I don’t give a damn about the cleaning, but I do expect to eat dinner -- to, at least, see dinner cooking -- when I get home. I call you when I’ll be late. And you’re late for no other reason than you decided that your work was more interesting at the moment. And you don’t even call.” That was the real point. He’d been worried about her. He called because he thought of them as connected; she didn’t call because she thought of him as a convenience.

“I’m real grateful that you condescend enough to set the table when I cook a meal. I suppose your neglecting that tonight is to teach me how much effort you make. Well, I’m not impressed.” She set the table, as if his setting the table would have made dinner closer to on time -- as if, indeed, he’d refused to set the table. “I’ve just spent an hour fighting traffic, I’m frazzled, I got a huge dump of information verbally that I haven’t had time to write down. One of us is sitting down relaxing, and it’s not me.”

Poor Carolyn! She’d just spent an afternoon driving around in his car -- his air-conditioned car -- gathering information for her dissertation research, and the traffic had her frazzled.

Of course, if she’d started home on time, the traffic wouldn’t have been as bad. Of course, if she hadn’t married him, she would have been teaching in some junior college in Podunk instead of having her days free for the research. Of course, she hadn’t told him that she would be late. Of course, she had agreed to cook on all but her crunch times, and this was the easiest of times in her schedule. Of course, she had announced last night that she’d prepare left-over meat loaf for tonight. But she sailed right past those inconvenient facts to get to the hardness of her struggle.

“And I am impressed. Look how fast you’re working. And it’s only an hour after the food was supposed to be ready. And such lavish attention to the preparation, too. Warm up the meal in one frying pan.”

“Well, I never claimed that operating the stove was an esoteric art. I even implied that even a man who needs someone else to find a file for him can learn to turn on the gas.” Now she was hitting below the belt. He was a hard-working executive, not the drone she pretended he was.

“I don’t need someone else to find a file for me. They find the files because taking care of files is their job. It’s just that I’m used to people who actually do their jobs -- not to people who decide that something else is more interesting for the moment and expect me to do their jobs for them.”

“Do you want to eat?” she asked as soon as she’d set out the food. “Or do you intend to get all your calories from alcohol?” He’d been waiting for her to sit down, but she made politeness a sign of alcoholism. He took his food.

“Well you drink, and don’t pretend you don’t.” She couldn’t make that claim to him. Indeed, at the wedding, she’d downed glasses of champagne in front of people who had never seen her smoke.

“The question, Bill, is not whether but how much and when.”

“You drink and nag me about my drinking. You smoke, and I don’t. But you don’t hear me nagging you,” he pointed out.

“I smoke in my office so as not to annoy you. I’d have been home earlier if I hadn’t taken time to smoke a cigarette when I wasn’t in the car.” And that was the first time she’d mentioned that. Did that mean that she’d taken a cigarette beak while the traffic she complained of got worse? Anyway, her containment of the tobacco odor was far from perfect.

“And the smell doesn’t go from your sacred office into the rest of the house? The door is open, even.”

“The door is open because the room is an oven in the summer with it closed. The afternoon sun shines right in.”

“When I’m home, you shut me out.” And that was the real problem. She had her life, and he wasn’t invited. She had her vice, and she was glad to share the stink of it. But he’d be happy with -- well, tolerant of -- the stink if she didn’t shut him out of so much else. “When I’m not home, you let the smoke into the rest of the house.”

“The door is closed to keep the smoke away from your oh-so-sensitive nose. It also allows you your pleasures while I’m at work at my job. Which doesn’t stop when the clock hits five like some people’s jobs do. You can watch TV while I’m collating information and looking up locations on the map. I notice that you didn’t watch while I was gone and not here to be distracted by the sound.” He worked a forty-hour week, longer when necessary. He did what other people expected him to do when they expected him to do it. If those other people were fewer than they had been, it was because he’d worked his way up. Sure, she didn’t stop at five. How often did she begin at nine? Anyway, what he did while she was late doing her dissertation research wasn’t something he was answerable for.