“Who cares?” she said. “If he wants to have a nervous breakdown, he can have one.”
“How very humanitarian of you.”
She stood up at this juncture, knowing she was perilously close to losing her temper completely.
“I know the Bastard Boy’s excuse,” Klein went on. “He’s anemic. He’s only got enough blood for his brain or his prick. If he gets a hard-on, he can’t remember his own name.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Jude said, swilling the ice around in her glass.
“Is that your excuse too?” Klein went on. “Have you got something down there you haven’t been telling us about?”
“If I had,” she said, “you’d be the last to know.”
And so saying, she deposited her drink, ice and all, down the front of his open shirt.
She regretted it afterwards, of course, and she drove home trying to invent some way of making peace with him without apologizing. Unable to think of any, she decided to let it lie. She’d had arguments with Klein before, drunk and sober. They were forgotten after a month; two at most.
She got in to find more messages from Estabrook awaiting her. He wasn’t sobbing any more. His voice was a colorless dirge, delivered from what was clearly genuine despair. The first call was filled with the same pleas she’d heard before. He told her he was losing his mind without her and needed her with him. Wouldn’t she at least talk to him, let him explain himself? The second call was less coherent. He said she didn’t understand how many secrets he had, how he was smothered in secrets and it was killing him. Wouldn’t she come back to see him, he said, even if it was just to collect her clothes?
That was probably the only part of her exit scene she would rewrite if she could play it over again. In her rage she’d left a goodly collection of personal items, jewelry and clothes, in Estabrook’s possession. Now she imagined him sobbing over them, sniffing them; God knows, even wearing them. But peeved as she was not to have taken them with her, she was not about to bargain for them now. There would come a time when she felt calm enough to go back and empty the cupboards and the drawers, but not quite yet.
There were no further calls after that night. With the New Year almost upon her, it was time to turn her attention to the challenge of earning a crust come January. She’d given up her job at Vandenburgh’s when Estabrook had proposed marriage, and she’d enjoyed his money freely while they were together, trusting—naively, no doubt—that if they ever broke up he’d deal with her in an honorable fashion. She hadn’t anticipated either the profound unease that had finally driven her from his side (the sense that she was almost owned, and that if she stayed with him a moment longer she’d never unshackle herself) or the vehemence of his revenge. Again, there’d come a time when she felt able to deal with the mutual mud-slinging of a divorce, but, like the business with the clothes, she wasn’t ready for that turmoil yet, even though she could hope for some monies from such a settlement. In the meanwhile, she had to think about employment.
Then, on December thirtieth, she received a call from Estabrook’s lawyer, Lewis Leader, a man she’d met only once but who was memorable for his loquaciousness. It was not in evidence on this occasion, however. He signaled what she assumed was his distaste for her desertion of his client with a manner that teetered on the rude. Did she know, he asked her, that Estabrook had been hospitalized? When she told him she didn’t, he replied that though he was sure she didn’t give a damn, he’d been charged with the duty of informing her. She asked him what had happened. He briskly explained that Estabrook had been found in the street in the early hours of the twenty-eighth, wearing only one item of clothing. He didn’t specify what.
“Is he hurt?” she asked.
“Not physically,” Leader replied. “But mentally he’s in a bad state. I thought you ought to know, even though I’m sure he wouldn’t want to see you.”