Don't Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk

enough when the sun shone, a little gloomy maybe in its old brown paint, but with all the space in the world for his big steel desk, his electric typewriter, his large library, the new red leather couch for his prescribed naps; all the wall area he needed for signed pictures of celebrity clients and framed bright posters of plays he had publicized; all the office furniture he had accumulated through two decades, including the old brown armchair and ottoman set which came from his one-room bachelor apartment, and which she had reupholstered three times. He wouldn't part with it, because she herself had bought it for him during that long depression time when they had been lovers instead of husband and wife; lovers, the rationale had been, because Henny could live more cheaply with her parents; lovers also, to be truthful, because Norman had liked it that way and she had had some slight difficulty getting him to propose.
     
     
("You're going to marry me, you son of a bitch, do you hear!" with hot tears all over her face. "I'm tired of this, five years of screwing around is plenty. We're going to get married in two weeks or you're never going to see me again, I swear to God!") Twenty years! With all the agony, those had been the days! Henny settled into the old armchair, and put her feet up on the ottoman to sentimentalize; whereupon the telephone rang and she jumped for it.
     
     
"Henny? Lester. We just landed blind. I've never been so scared in my goddamn life."
     
     
"Hello, Lester. Where's Norman?"
     
     
"He stayed over. Henny, my mouth's full of blood. Why the hell do those broads give out gum when you come down? I damn near chewed off my own tongue. I think I swallowed a piece of it, Henny. This wasn't gum. It was meat."
     
     
"Why didn't Norman come home? I was expecting him. I have a big dinner-"
     
     
"He's phoning you tonight. A proposition like this takes a little looking into."
     
     
"Jesus, I was hoping this trip would cure him, Lester."
     
     
"Baby, look out of your window. Who needs this? I think Norman may be smarter than all of us. That island is paradise, and that hotel's a find. With what I told him to do with it, you're good for twenty-five, thirty thousand a year there, living easy in a goddamn garden of Eden. Hey, there come my bags. So long. I got a closing at four o'clock in the Chrysler building, and I'm boiled as an owl."
     
     
"You sound it."
     
     
"They give away booze free in first class, Henny. You got to drink up that difference in the fare, or Pan Am's buggered you. Bye-"
     
     
"Lester, Lester! Didn't he say anything about coming home?"
     
     
"He said tomorrow, maybe. Bye, small fry."
     
     
Henny sat dismayed, her hand still on the telephone, staring out at the whirling snow. This was Norman, all over. Yesterday, their twentieth anniversary day, he had spent on this dizzy excursion to the Caribbean. She had a turkey ready for the oven, champagne in the icebox; a belated celebration was better than none. Evidently, it was going to be even more belated.
     
     
2
     
     
The blast of sleety air shocked Paperman when he arrived next evening. The plane was three hours late. It was dark in the vast flat plain of Idlewild crisscrossed with miles of runway lights; dark, freezing, and windy. He encountered thick slush underfoot until he entered the terminal; then a long long trudge amid hurrying crowds, through lamplit corridors leprous with advertising, to the baggage claim counter; then a long wait in stifling steam heat through which frigid drafts lanced, chilling his neck and ankles, in a continuous clamor of loudspeakers; then a long shoving contest over the bags as they arrived, then a long search for a porter, as he wasn't supposed to carry luggage; then a long stand in wind and needling sleet amid a horde of angry combative people all jousting for the rare taxicabs that appeared; then a scary ride on an icy parkway, in a crawling river of skidding, headlight-blazing cars,