Too Much Happiness

Ernie even for one week. One day very soon he would come home and find her gone. Gone her coat and boots, her lovely clothes and the kimono that I had brought over. Gone her taffy hair and her tickling habits and the extra warmth of her skin and the little
un-unhs
as she moved. All gone with no explanation, not a word on paper. Not a word.
    Ernie was not one, however, to shut himself up and mourn. He said so, when he phoned to tell me the news and check on my availability for Sunday dinner. We climbed the stairs to the Old Chelsea and he commented on the fact that this was our last dinner before the Christmas holidays. He helped me off with my coat and I smelled Nina’s smell. Could it still be on his skin?
    No. The source was revealed when he passed something to me. Something like a large handkerchief.
    “Just put it in your coat pocket,” he said.
    Not a handkerchief. The texture was sturdier, with a slight ribbing. An undershirt.
    “I don’t want it around,” he said, and by his voice you might have thought that it was just underwear itself he did not want around, never mind that it was Nina’s and smelled of Nina.
    He ordered the roast beef, and cut and chewed it with his normal efficiency and polite appetite. I gave him the news from home, which as usual at this time of year consisted of the size of snowdrifts, the number of blocked roads, the winter havoc which gave us distinction.
    After some time Ernie said, “I went round to his house. There was nobody in it.”
    Whose house?
    Her uncle’s, he said. He knew which house because he and Nina had driven past it, after dark. There was nobody there now, he said, they had packed up and gone. Her choice, after all.
    “It’s a woman’s privilege,” he said. “Like they say, it’s a woman’s privilege to change her mind.”
    His eyes, now that I looked into them, had a dry famished look, and the skin around them was dark and wrinkled. He pursed his mouth, controlling a tremor, then talked on, with an air of trying to see all sides, trying to understand.
    “She couldn’t leave her old uncle,” he said. “She didn’t have the heart to run out on him. I said we could take him in with us, because I was used to old people, but she said she would sooner make a break. Then I guess she didn’t have the heart to after all.”
    “Better not to expect too much. Some things I guess you’re just not meant to have.”
    When I went past the coats on my way to the washroom I got the shirt out of my pocket. I stuffed it in with the used towels.
    That day in the library I had been unable to go on with Sir Gawain. I had torn a page from my notebook and picked up my pen and walked out. On the landing outside the library doors there was a pay phone, and beside that hung a phone book. I looked through the phone book and on the piece of paper I had brought I wrote two numbers. They were not phone numbers but addresses.
    1648 Henfryn Street.
    The other number, which I needed only to check, having seen it both recently and on Christmas card envelopes, was 363 Carlisle.
    I walked back through the tunnel to the Arts Building and entered the little shop across from the Common Room. I had enough change in my pocket to buy an envelope and a stamp. I tore off the paper with the Carlisle Street address on it and put that scrap into the envelope. I sealed the envelope and on the front of it I wrote the other, longer number with the name of Mr. Purvis and the address on Henfryn Street. All in block capitals. Then I licked and fixed the stamp. I think that in those days it would have been a four-cent stamp.
    Just outside the shop was a mail chute. I slipped the envelope into it, there in the wide lower corridor of the Arts Building with people passing me on the way to classes, on the way to have a smoke and maybe a game of bridge in the Common Room. On their way to deeds they didn’t know they had in them.

Deep-Holes
    Sally packed devilled eggs-something she hated to take on a picnic, because they were so messy. Ham sandwiches, crab salad, lemon tarts-also a packing problem. Kool-Aid for the children, a half-size Mumm’s for herself and Alex. She would have just a sip, because she was still nursing. She had bought plastic champagne glasses for this occasion, but when Alex spotted her handling them he got the real ones-a wedding present-out of the china cabinet. She protested, but he insisted, and took charge of them himself, the wrapping and packing.
    “Dad is really a sort