Read Online Cast a Cold Eye by Mary McCarthy - Free Book Online Page B

attitude they shared. As for the unfortunate wife, she could never make out what had gone wrong. In the end, she came to believe her husband when he told her, as he frequently did, that she had no talent for human relations.
    Between the Scylla of an Al and the Charybdis of a Jerry’s wife, Francis steers his uneasy course. Perhaps it is the vicissitudes of this life, the vigilance against the true and imaginary dangers, that are responsible for the change in Francis. Certainly it has been hard for him to be obliged, every year or so, to re-examine his premises. Francis had, it seemed to him, made a good bargain with the world. Yet whenever a Jerry’s wife took a fancy to him, he questioned his own shrewdness. If she likes me, he would ask himself, why wouldn’t others, and if likes, why not loves, and does she really and how much? It would be weeks, after such an experience, before Francis could silence these questions. Like a businessman, he feared that he had closed his deal with life too soon; the buyer might have paid much more. And as the businessman can only set his mind at rest by assuring himself that the property he disposed of was really good riddance of a negligible asset, so Francis’ one recourse was to persuade himself once again that he had been perfectly correct in setting the zero, dejected yet triumphant, opposite his own name. But however successful as auditing, these midnight reckonings must have been painful, even to Francis; one night his anesthetized spirit must have awakened in rage and spite.
    Or perhaps nature does abhor a vacuum; perhaps the wall of the sealed, sterile chamber that was Francis’ nature collapsed from atmospheric pressure, and in rushed all the unattached emotions—that is, hatred, envy, fear, which, unlike love, do not cling to a definite object—that float, gaseous, over man’s sphere. At any rate, Francis has been changing. Under our very eyes, he has been turning into everything that he, by definition, was not. If you have failed to notice the steps in this process, it is because you are so much in the habit of not thinking about Francis that he could transform himself into a snake on your parlor floor without attracting your attention. Your indifference has been a cloak of invisibility behind which he has been preparing for you some rather startling surprises. But now that your memory has been jogged on the point, you will recall that his manners, while never highly polished, were once more acceptable than they are today. There was a time, for example, when he left your cocktail parties promptly at seven-thirty, taking with him one of the more burdensome women guests for a table-d’hôte dinner in the Village. But in the course of years his leavetakings have been steadily retarded; soon your wife has been cooking scrambled eggs for him at nine o’clock; and now you are lucky if at midnight or two or three you do not have to make up a bed for him in the spare room or, at the very best, take him home in a taxi and open his door for him. Once it was the interesting guests who stayed, disputing, quoting poetry, playing the piano, singing; today the fascinating people have always somewhere else to go, and every party boils down to Francis Cleary; you do not question this, possibly, but accept it as an analogy to life.
    Perhaps it is Francis’ growing addiction to drink (he no longer waits for you to notice his empty glass but helps himself from the shaker or inquires boldly, “Did someone say something about another drink?”) that keeps him late and is also responsible for the mounting truculence of his conversation. In the old days Francis was always prompt to shut off one of his anecdotes when his companion’s interest slightly wavered away from him; indeed, much of his conversation seemed to be constructed around the interruption he awaited. Gradually, however, he has become more adhesive to his topics. He may be interrupted by the arrival of a newcomer, the host may