The Adjustment

The Adjustment - By Scott Phillips


ONE



THE FUNNY PAGES



WHEN I GOT home at five and told Sally I was heading for Kansas City, she blew right up and wanted to know where the hell I got off just taking off without any advance warning.

We’d been married for a long time—since ’39—but the war came along and I was gone so long I really had halfway forgotten I was someone’s husband. I’d actually been less accountable when I was in the army, having only a corrupt first looey to answer to instead of a wife and an employer.

“Listen up. This is my job, and unless you want to get one yourself I need to keep it. And when the old man says jump, I jump.”

I closed my suitcase and tried to kiss her, and she pulled back. I laughed and lunged for her, caught her by the shoulders and pulled her close. She relaxed and kissed me back, and I was starting to wish I could put off my departure by an hour or so.

“Just tell the old man to give you a little more advance notice next time. I had a nice dinner planned.” Her pretty pout turned into a beautiful half smile, and I swatted her on the ass on my way to the front door.





I HEADED NORTH in my company Olds to Seventeenth and headed east past Wichita U, where I’d spent four years studying business and trying to screw coeds when Sally wasn’t looking, and wondered idly about going back nights for a master’s degree. For the moment I was enjoying my work at Collins Aircraft well enough, but who knew, it might get tired. Right now it was hard to imagine doing any one thing for the rest of my life, even though I knew that I was going to have to pick something before too long.

I turned onto Oliver and then onto Thirteenth, where I was surprised to see some signs of development; this far northeast had seemed destined to be farmland forever. Like all the other changes Wichita had undergone in my absence I took it as almost a personal affront, something that had been done just to disorient me when I got back.

The sun was already down, and it was cold as a well digger’s ass, and right then it started to snow. I cursed and turned on the wipers; if it was slick all the way to KC it would add an hour or more to the trip.





NOT THAT IT really mattered. The truth was I could have spent the night in Wichita and made the trip early the next morning. But there was something I wanted to do that night if I could arrange it, and an extra night away from Wichita was always cause for celebration, even if it meant pissing off my beautiful, mercurial Sally.





IT WAS ALMOST midnight when I hit Kansas City, and a quarter past when I stepped inside Drake’s, an all-night diner catering to employees of St. Luke’s hospital. The woman I wanted to see didn’t get off until three in the morning, but if I read the Star and the Times both right down to the classifieds I could keep myself occupied until she got home to let me in.

At the counter I ordered coffee and eggs. The Star led with the murder-suicide of a married couple in tony Overland Park, the twist being that the wife had done the shooting. Their grown daughter, other relatives, and longtime family friends all proclaimed their bafflement; the deceased had no known health or marital problems, and they’d planned to mark their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary two months hence with a party that had been anticipated as one of the highlights of Kansas City’s social season. Hubby was a reserve officer in the Army Air Corps and had flown missions over Germany, the article said, and had been back about as long as I had.

On an inside page was a nice photo of the murder house, a vast Tudor with a palatial lawn and circular drive. “The Harold J. Lamburton residence, scene Friday of the shotgun murder of Mr. Lamburton and the suicide of his wife, the former Christine Whittaker. Star File Photo.” That’s high society, when the paper keeps a file picture of your house. I wondered if she used a rabbit gun for better coverage, or something bigger calling for greater accuracy; a lot of girls in that part of the country were handy with a shotgun, even—maybe especially—in that rarified social stratum.

“You want more coffee?” the counterman asked, tapping the portraits of the dead. “Lady was f*cking the Fuller Brush man while he was away is what I think. He found out about it and she killed him.”

“Fuller Brush men take a Christian oath not to f*ck housewives.”

“Milkman, gardener, eggman, I don’t know. One of ’em.” He had a very distracting deformative growth on the left side of his nose that made his whole face look lopsided. It had almost the exact texture and color of a cauliflower, with several thick black hairs curling outward from it. This, I’m guessing, was why he was stuck on the overnight shift. “All’s I know is after a while a wife gets restless with a man gone. You see that picture of the two of ’em?”

I reopened the Star to page four for another look at their portraits. Harold was a burly, round-faced man with the look of a petty tyrant, whereas Christine, looking a good deal younger than her forty-eight years, beamed forth from her photo with the enthusiastic smile of a girl. It was easy to picture her as a flapper right out of John Held, Jr., and just as easy to picture that same girl waking up one morning twenty-five years on and, upon finding herself married to Wallace Beery, trying to work out where he’d hidden the key to the gun closet.

“She ain’t hard to look at, for a gal her age, is all I’m saying,” the counterman said. “I’d’ve f*cked her.” He pulled the paper close to that cauliflower tumor, squinting. “Look how popeyed she is, though. Maybe she was hooked on pep pills. Those people get all kinds of crazy ideas in their heads.”

An old man came in, shuffling and wheezing, and joined in the discussion; his son had known the murdered man slightly. “Cruel man, Lamburton. Wouldn’t let her travel to see her mother once, for instance, when the old lady was sick. I expect it only got worse after he’d been gone a while.” He took off his scarf and his thick woolen overcoat and ordered a bowl of chili, which he proceeded to slurp like a small child. Coat off, he was revealed as a tall man bent over rather than a short heavyset one; his hands were enormous, hammy, broken-knuckled things, so dry there were cracks at the joints, filled in with dried blood like blackened spackle.

After a while a gaunt young man in a white coat came in and ordered coffee and eggs, followed by a couple of middle-aged women with their nurse’s caps still on. At ten after three I sauntered down to where Broadway turns into Nichols Parkway. After ten minutes sitting in the cold on the stoop of Vickie’s building she showed up, looking good for a woman who’d just wrapped up a ten hour shift of waking people up for shots and getting ordered around by twenty-five-year-old interns. She put her finger up to her lip to keep me quiet and opened her front door. Once inside she turned on a lamp and shut the door; it was still pretty dark in there, with her walls painted a curious mallard green.

“Wasn’t expecting to see you anytime soon, Wayne.”

“Unexpected business trip, just came up this afternoon. Thought I’d look you up.”

“Lucky me, I guess.”

We necked for a minute, then started dancing towards the back of the apartment where the bedroom was. Then she stopped me and pointed to the couch.

“Sit down for a minute, I got something to show you before we go any further.”

I did as I was told and after a few seconds’ rustling around in the bedroom she came back out holding a folded sheet of Armed Services stationery, which she stuck into my hand.

“I want you to read this before we get started, Wayne,” she said, and then she went into the kitchen.

The letter was from her husband, an Army MD who claimed to have seen some awful things before the peace. Now he was in Vienna in the American sector taking care not just of our own but the Krauts as well, in particular their malnourished orphan children. The Captain tended toward the purple end of the epistolary spectrum, both in describing the rickety tots in his care and in his choice of endearments, and the whole thing smelled to me of rosewater and horseshit. At “Eternally, your Jeffrey” I rolled my eyes skyward one last time, folded the thing up, and called her back in.

“So?” I said.

“Does it bother you, knowing you’re cuckolding Dr. Schweitzer?”

“Not particularly,” I said.

“Okay.” She gave me a funny, quizzical look, as if that wasn’t exactly the answer she was expecting.

“How long after you got married did he ship out?”

“Right after.”

Getting hitched was his idea, I guessed, the idea being to keep her on the hook while he was gone, but I didn’t say it. “If you’re feeling bad about it . . . ”

“I know, I know, he’s probably bedded down with a dozen grateful Kraut widows after he vaccinated their kids.” She snatched the letter out of my hand. “I just thought you ought to have an idea who you’re messing with is all.”

Then she grinned and stood facing me, hands on her hips, tits thrust forward. “You want to try and take my uniform off, smart guy?” she said, and I started peeling away her stiff whites piece by piece, with their arousing starch smell.

I knew exactly who I was messing with.





MUCH LATER IN the dark as I lay there listening to the radiator popping, she startled me by saying quietly, “Wayne? You asleep?”

“Nope.”

“How’d you get the scar?”

“Which scar?”

“You know which.”

It wouldn’t do to tell her the truth. Broadminded though she was, “stabbed by a rival pimp in Rome” wasn’t going to score me any points romantically, so I said “Iwo Jima.”

“I happen to know you spent the whole war in Europe,” she said, but she didn’t press the point, and after a while we went to sleep.





AT ELEVEN IN the morning we strolled over to Drake’s for breakfast. The man with the cauliflower nose was gone, replaced by a funereal chain smoker who made a show of letting his ash extend out over the grill until the last possible moment, at which point he tapped it onto the floor.

The Sunday Star had a rehash of yesterday’s murder without much new information, but with some illuminating photos from the society files of the unfortunate couple at various charity events. One of them seemed chosen specifically for the enervated dementia in Christine Lamburton’s eyes as she stood in a semicircle of worn-out former debs honoring themselves for rolling bandages during the war, or some such laudable sacrifice. Nutty as Mrs. Lamburton looked in that picture, I recognized it as the kind of crazy that can seem like a whole lot of fun at first, before the scary kicks in; late in the game had the old boy ever seen that cockeyed glint and worried, just a little, for his life?

Victoria’s appetite was healthy and she managed an entire plate of corned beef hash and three fried eggs, and I settled for Cream of Wheat with a side of bacon. Afterwards we walked down Broadway to where my car was parked and I kissed her goodbye. I was about to pull away from the curb when she knocked on the window, opened the door, and slid in beside me.

“When are you coming back next?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “Hard to know when I’ll be free for a couple days.”

“Let me know in advance next time. I’ll take some time off.” She kissed me again, the taste of her mouth a pleasant mix of coffee and corned beef and Doublemint, and then she slid out of the car and walked carefully back up the icy pavement to her building.





DOCTOR BECK OWNED an apartment building on Troost off of Van Brunt, one of those places with a big staircase up the middle and three floors of apartments on either side. He kept one apartment on the first floor for his own use, and I wondered what the other tenants made of their occasional short-term neighbors, sad young women moving in for a week or so and then moving on to their other distant lives. I suppose in between those brief tenancies the doctor must have entertained women there himself.

The girl I was picking up today was a stranger to me, the first I’d chauffeured back to Wichita under similar circumstances since before the war. She was skinny and sniffly and peaked, and she didn’t say anything when Beck gave her last-minute instructions for the coming few days. She didn’t speak until we got down to Emporia, about halfway to Wichita, and that was just to express a desire to go to the bathroom.

“You want something to eat?”

“I don’t have any cash on me,” she said as I pulled off onto Telegraph Street.

“You don’t need cash,” I said.





SHE NIBBLED AT a grilled cheese sandwich and wouldn’t meet my eyes. The waitress gave me a nasty look, though, like I was the one who’d made the girl miserable. She had mousy brown hair and acne, and I sat wondering what the hell old man Collins had been thinking.

“What’s your name?” I asked her, finally.

“Emily,” she said.

“You have a job, Emily?”

“I was in the steno pool at Collins.” She sneaked a quick glance at my face.

“You were?”

“I was fired after . . . ” She took a long time swallowing a bite of her sandwich. “They let me go when I got in trouble.”

“Is that so.”

She looked me square in the face now, puzzled. “Uh-huh.”

“Girly, they can’t fire you.”

“Sure they can.” Her eyes were wet and her voice quavering but she wasn’t giving in to it yet. “It’s in the employee manual, about moral turpitude.”

“Doesn’t mean a damned thing. You’ve got the great man over a barrel.”

So I laid it out for poor Emily: in a couple of days she was to call Mr. Collins’s personal secretary, Miss Grau, and tell her that a man named Hiram Fish has been pestering her, trying to find out where she’d been and why she wasn’t employed by the company any more.

“Who’s this man Fish?”

“Someone Mrs. Collins uses to keep up on Mr. Collins’s comings and goings.”

“And what does Miss Grau do after I tell her this?”

“Miss Grau gets you your job back, with a raise if you look like you’re not sure you want it back.”

“I’m not sure I do,” she said, but I noticed she was eating the second half of her grilled cheese with gusto.

“A job at Beechcraft or Cessna, then. Listen, you think all he owes you is a trip to KC and a grilled cheese sandwich? Take it from me, a lot of girls have been in your situation, and some of them ended up better off than others.”

I didn’t give two shits about the dim bulb across the booth from me, but I got a hell of a kick out of f*cking with my employer and her impregnator, Everett Collins. Aviation pioneer, friend to Wiley Post and Lucky Lindy, founder of one of the nation’s biggest aircraft plants, a bigger man himself than anyone in Wichita had ever thought about being. He’d been my childhood hero, which may go some way to explaining the depth of my current contempt for the man.