Mildred Pierce - James M. Cain [135]
"She didn't go anywhere."
"How do you know?"
"Her dress is there."
"Couldn't she have changed it?"
"Her car is there."
"Couldn't she have gone with somebody else?"
This simple possibility hadn't even occurred to Mildred, and she was about to apologize and go back to her room when she became aware of Monty's arm. He was leaning on it, but it was across the door, in a curious way, as though to bar her from the room. Her hand, which was resting on the door casing, slipped up, ifipped the light switch. Veda was looking at her, from the bed.
Monty, his voice an emasculated, androgynous yell, crammed all the bitterness, the futility of his life into a long, hysterical denunciation of Mildred. He said she had used him for her special purposes ever since she had met him. He said she was incapable of honor, and didn't know what it meant to stand by her commitments. He recalled the first $20 she had given him, and how she had later begrudged it. He worked down to their marriage, and correctly accused her of using him as bait to attract the errant Veda. But, he said, what she had forgotten was that he was live bait, and the quarry and the bait had fallen in love, and how did she like that? And what was she going to do about it? But there was considerable talk about money mixed in with the chase, and what it added up to was that he had shown his independence of one woman who had been keeping him, with a pie wagon, by switching over and letting another woman keep him, with a voice.
Mildred, however, barely heard him. She sat in the little upholstered chair, near the door, her hat on the side of her head, her handbag in her lap, her toes absurdly turned in. But while her eyes were on the floor, her mind was on the lovely thing in the 'bed, and again she was physically sick at what its presence there meant. When Monty had talked some little time, stalking gauntly about in his pajamas, Veda interrupted him with affectionate petulance: "Darling! Does it make any difference what such nitwits do, or whether they pay, or even know what a commitment is? Look what a pest she is to me. I literally can't open my mouth in a theatre, or a radio studio, or anywhere, that she isn't there, bustling down the aisle, embarrassing me before people, all to get her share of the glory, if any. But what do I do? I certainly don't go screaming around the way you're doing. It would be undignified. And very—" here Veda stifled a sleepy yawn—"very bad for my throat. . . . Get dressed now, and we'll clear out, and leave her to her pie plates, and by lunch time it'll merely seem funny."
Monty went to his dressing room, and for a time there was silence, except for Mildred's breathing, which was curiously heavy. Veda found cigarettes on the floor, and lit one, and lay there smoking in the way she had acquired lately, sucking the smoke in and letting it out in thick curls, so it entered her mouth but didn't reach her throat. Mildred's breathing became heavier, as though she were an animal, and had run a distance, and was panting. Monty came 'out, in tweeds, a blue shirt, and tan shoes, his hat in one hand, a grip in the other. Veda nodded, squashed out her cigarette. Then she got up, went to Monty's mirror, and began combing her hair, while little cadenzas absentmindedly cascaded out of her throat, and cold drops cascaded over Mildred's heart. For Veda was stark naked. From the massive, singer's torso, with the dairy quaking in front, to the slim hips, to the lovely legs, there wasn't so much as a garter to hide a path of skin.
Veda, still humming, headed for the dressing room, and Monty handed her the kimono, from the foot of the bed. It was then that Mildred leaped. But it wasn't at Monty that she leaped, her husband, the man who had been untrue to her. It was at Veda, her daughter, the 'girl who had done no more than what Mildred had once said was a woman's right. It was a ruthless creature seventeen years younger than herself,