Vandergast and the Girl

Vandergast to his neighbors— the grinding of a garage door and hiss of gravel in the driveway. He worked for the insurance company whose talisman is a phoenix rising in flames ...non omnis moriar. From his desk he had a view of the street— translucent raincoats, and umbrellas, fluorescent plate-glass windows. A girl knelt down, arranging underwear on a female dummy— sea waves and, on the gale, Venus, these busy days, poised in her garter belt and stockings. * The next day he saw her eating in the restaurant where he usually ate. Soon they were having lunch together elsewhere. She came from Dallas. This was only a start, she was ambitious, twenty-five and still unmarried. Green eyes with silver spiricles ... red hair ... When he held the car door open her legs were smooth and slender. “I was wondering,” she said, “when you'd get round to it,” and laughed. * Vandergast says he never intended having an affair. And was that what this was? The names that people give to things ... What do definitions and divorce-court proceedings have to do with the breathless reality? O little lamp at the bedside with views of Venice and the Bay of Naples, you understood!Lactona toothbrush and suitcase bought in a hurry, you were the witnesses of the love we made in bed together. Schrafft's Chocolate Cherries, surely you remember when she said she'd be true forever, and, watching “Dark Storm,” we decided there is something to be said, after all, for soap opera, “if it makes people happy.” * The Vandergasts are having some trouble finding a buyer for their house. When I go for a walk with Tippy I pass the unweeded tennis court, the empty garage, windows heavily shuttered. Mrs. Vandergast took the children and went back to her family. And Vandergast moved to New Jersey, where he works for an insurance company whose emblem is the Rock of Gibraltar— the rest of his life laid out with the child-support and alimony payments. As for the girl, she vanished. Was it worth it? Ask Vandergast. You'd have to be Vandergast, looking through his eyes at the house across the street, in Orange, New Jersey. Maybe on wet days umbrellas and raincoats set his heart thudding. Maybe he talks to his pillow, and it whispers, moving red hair. In any case, he will soon be forty.