Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates Page A

again, to check the number of an acquaintance who had told him, a month before, that there might soon be an opening in hisoffice. The book wasn’t in his inside pocket; he plunged his hands into the other pockets of his coat and then his pants, cracking an elbow painfully against the wall of the booth, but all he could find were the old letters and the piece of chocolate from his desk. Cursing, he dropped the chocolate on the floor and, as if it were a lighted cigarette, stepped on it. These exertions in the heat of the booth made his breathing rapid and shallow. He was feeling faint by the time he saw the address book right in front of him, on top of the coin box, where he’d left it. His finger trembled in the dial, and when he started to speak, clawing the collar away from his sweating neck with his free hand, his voice was as weak and urgent as a beggar’s.
    “Jack,” he said. “I was just wondering—just wondering if you’d heard anything new on the opening you mentioned a while back.”
    “On the which?”
    “The opening. You know. You said there might be a job in your—”
    “Oh, that. No, haven’t heard a thing, Walt. I’ll be in touch with you if anything breaks.”
    “Okay, Jack.” He pulled open the folding door of the booth and leaned back against the stamped-tin wall, breathing deeply to welcome the rush of cool air. “I just thought it might’ve slipped your mind or something,” he said. His voice was almost normal again. “Sorry to bother you.”
    “Hell, that’s okay,” said the hearty voice in the receiver. “What’s the matter, boy? Things getting a little sticky where you are?”
    “ Oh no,” Walter found himself saying, and he was immediately glad of the lie. He almost never lied, and it always surprised him to discover how easy it could be. His voice gained confidence. “No. I’m all right here, Jack, it’s just that I didn’twant to— you know, I thought it might have slipped your mind, is all. How’s the family?”
    When the conversation was over, he guessed there was nothing more to do but go home. But he continued to sit in the open booth for a long time, with his feet stretched out on the drugstore floor, until a small, canny smile began to play on his face, slowly dissolving and changing into a look of normal strength. The ease of the lie had given him an idea that grew, the more he thought it over, into a profound and revolutionary decision.
    He would not tell his wife. With luck he was sure to find some kind of work before the month was out, and in the meantime, for once in his life, he would keep his troubles to himself. Tonight, when she asked how the day had gone, he would say, “Oh, all right,” or even “Fine.” In the morning he would leave the house at the usual time and stay away all day, and he would go on doing the same thing every day until he had a job.
    The phrase “Pull yourself together” occurred to him, and there was more than determination in the way he pulled himself together there in the phone booth, the way he gathered up his coins and straightened his tie and walked out to the street: there was a kind of nobility.
    Several hours had to be killed before the normal time of his homecoming, and when he found himself walking west on Forty-second Street he decided to kill them in the Public Library. He mounted the wide stone steps importantly, and soon he was installed in the reading room, examining a bound copy of last year’s Life magazines and going over and over his plan, enlarging and perfecting it.
    He knew, sensibly, that there would be nothing easy about the day-to-day deception. It would call for the constant vigilance and cunning of an outlaw. But wasn’t it the very difficulty of theplan that made it worthwhile? And in the end, when it was all over and he could tell her at last, it would be a reward worth every minute of the ordeal. He knew just how she would look at him when he told her—in blank disbelief at first and then,