Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter, Darlene Harbour Unrue Page B

occupations. He thought there was something to be said for living with one person day and night the year round. It brings out the worst, but it brings out the best, too, and Miriam’s best was pretty damn swell. He couldn’t describe it. It was easy to talk about her faults. He remembered all of them, he could add them up against her like rows of figures in a vast unpaid debt. He had lived with her for four years, and even now sometimes he woke out of a sound sleepin a sweating rage with himself, asking himself again why he had ever wasted a minute on her. She wasn’t beautiful in his style. He confessed to a weakness for the kind that knocks your eye out. Her notion of daytime dress was a tailored suit with a round-collared blouse and a little felt hat like a bent shovel pulled down over her eyes. In the evening she put on a black dinner dress, positively disappeared into it. But she did her hair well and had the most becoming nightgowns he ever saw. You could have put her mind in a peanut shell. She hadn’t temperament of the kind he had got used to in the Mexican girls. She did not approve of his use of the word temperament, either. She thought it was a kind of occupational disease among artists, or a trick they practiced to make themselves interesting. In any case, she distrusted artists and she distrusted temperament. But there was something about her. In cold blood he could size her up to himself, but it made him furious if anyone even hinted a criticism against her. His second wife had made a point of being catty about Miriam. In the end he could almost be willing to say this had led to his second divorce. He could not bear hearing Miriam called a mousy little nit-wit—at least not by that woman. . .
    They both jumped nervously at an explosion in the street, the backfire of an automobile.
    “Another revolution,” said the fat scarlet young man in the tight purplish suit, at the next table. He looked like a parboiled sausage ready to burst from its skin. It was the oldest joke since the Mexican Independence, but he was trying to look as if he had invented it. The journalist glanced back at him over a sloping shoulder. “Another of those smart-cracking newspaper guys,” he said in a tough voice, too loudly on purpose, “sitting around the Hotel Regis lobby wearing out the spittoons.”
    The smart-cracker swelled visibly and turned a darker red. “Who do you think you’re talking about, you banjo-eyed chinless wonder, you?” he asked explicitly, spreading his chest across the table.
    “Somebody way up, no doubt,” said the journalist, in his natural voice, “somebody in with the government, I’ll bet.”
    “Dyuhwana fight?” asked the newspaper man, trying to unwedge himself from between the table and his chair, which sat against the wall.
    “Oh, I don’t mind,” said the journalist, “if you don’t.”
    The newspaper man’s friends laid soothing paws all over him and held him down. “Don’t start anything with that shrimp,” said one of them, his wet pink eyes trying to look sober and responsible. “For crisesake, Joe, can’t you see he’s about half your size and a feeb to boot? You wouldn’t hit a feeb, now, Joe, would you?”
    “I’ll feeb him,” said the newspaper man, wiggling faintly under restraint.
    “Señores’n, señores’n,” urged the little Mexican waiter, “there are respectable ladies and gentlemen present. Please, a little silence and correct behavior, please.”
    “Who the hell are you , anyhow?” the newspaper man asked the journalist, from under his shelter of hands, around the thin form of the waiter.
    “Nobody you’d wanta know, Joe,” said another of his pawing friends. “Pipe down now before these greasers turn in a general alarm. You know how liable they are to go off when you least expect it. Pipe down, now, Joe, now you just remember what happened the last time, Joe. Whaddayah care, anyhow?”
    “ Señores’n ,” said the little waiter, working