Mr. Bridge_ A Novel - Evan S. Connell [67]
During intermission they met in the lobby. Mr. Bridge introduced Ruth.
Later she remarked, “He’s mad!” and Mr. Bridge laughed because that was his own opinion.
“Did you notice those socks?” he asked.
And Ruth said, “They’re great! I wish you’d wear something jazzy.”
He tried to imagine himself wearing a pair of yellow socks. He could see himself wearing them at home, as a joke, but that was all. He tried to imagine wearing them to the office, and he had no trouble seeing the expression on Julia’s face.
Whether it was Ruth’s comment or only the sight of the yellow socks, he did not know, but not long after the ballet he found many things reminding him of them. Each time he saw a pair of socks of any color he was reminded of Dr. Sauer’s socks, or if he saw anything yellow, even a banana. It was annoying. And inevitably, the more he determined to forget them, the more often he discovered himself thinking about them.
In an effort to rid himself of them he thought about them deliberately; and doing so he remembered the psychiatrist commenting at lunch one day that it is not what a man does that he later regrets but what a man has failed to do.
Then it seemed probable to Mr. Bridge that Alex Sauer had had a desire for yellow socks and rather than meditate on this he had gone straight out and bought them. Rather than risk some later regret he had simply bought them. There might be some sound psychological principle here. Indeed, he reflected, there might very well be considerable merit in this. He recalled how often he had denied himself some inconsequential object he wanted, denied himself a slight pleasure or satisfaction for no truly reasonable reason but only because his heritage argued against indulgence. Yet how rational was such an argument?
Without confiding to anyone what he had made up his mind to do, he took to pausing in front of shop windows in the hope that he might see something he wanted, which he meant to buy at once. He hoped that when he found the object he was seeking it would not be too expensive, or too ridiculous; however, it should be expensive enough to cause discomfort, and mildly absurd. It should be a thing which previously he would never have considered buying. And still it must be desirable, because this was intended as a little exercise in liberation, not one more punishment.
He looked at fur-lined gloves, suits, neckties, fedoras, and camel’s-hair overcoats. He looked at wristwatches that glowed in the dark, unusual cufflinks, stickpins, rings, and jeweled fountain pens. He did not want any of them.
He decided to look for something larger. He began to contemplate sports cars, which were a possibility because they had the advantage of being rather outrageous and yet were recognized as a permissible indulgence, and he found two or three which appealed to him. However, that was a lot of money to invest in what was essentially nothing more than an experiment so he decided not to buy another car.
One more week went by. He felt discouraged and a bit foolish, thankful nobody knew what he was doing. Also, it was galling that after examining most of the merchandise in dozens of store windows he could not find anything he wanted. He began to feel resentful toward Dr. Sauer, whose fault this was. The preposterous search was using up time—here a moment, there a moment. He calculated that he had wasted two or three hours.
One day at the Terrace Grill while grinding pepper into his salad he inquired about the yellow socks. What had become of them? Had they been thrown away? No, no, no, the psychiatrist answered as if it were a perfectly natural question, those socks had not been thrown away and if Mr. Bridge would like to see more of them