Earthbound

by Richard Matheson

  He glanced aside as Ellen came in, carrying a mug of coffee. “Would you like some cookies?” she asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  She sat across from him and they exchanged polite smiles. “Did you sleep all right?” she asked.

  “Yes; thank you.”

  No, thank you. Yes, thank you. David thought: Any moment now, we’ll start addressing each other as Mr. and Mrs. Cooper. He started feebly. “What?”

  “Did you?” she repeated.

  “Uh … not too well.” He’d been about to answer that he’d slept like a block of wood but decided that she’d wonder then why he was still so tired.

  “I’m sorry,” Ellen said. “Were you sick?”

  “A little bit. Wine with dinner always gets to me.”

  She nodded, then in several moments said, “If you don’t feel well—”

  “What?”

  “Go back to bed.”

  He would have taken prompt advantage of her suggestions if it hadn’t made him bristle so. “I’ll be all right” he said. What would you like to do today? he heared himself inquiring in his mind. We could take that picnic. He didn’t choose to repeat the words aloud. He had no wish to go on a picnic or even to find out what she’d like to do. He wanted to go back to bed and sleep some more. He wanted Marianna to join him in bed and—

  “What’s the matter?” Ellen asked as he shivered.

  “What?”

  “You have a chill?”

  “It’s cold in here.” He took a sip of coffee. “I’ll get dressed,” he said. He rubbed at his forehead, grimacing.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked again.

  He squinted at her. “What?”

  “You have a headache, too?” Her tone was formal.

  “A little bit” he answered stiffly.

  “Maybe you’re coming down with something.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’ve always been susceptible to flu.”

  “Have I?” He knew how hostile he sounded but didn’t care.

  Ellen’s smile was distant. “Haven’t you?” The truth of her words only plagued him further.

  “This conversation doesn’t seem to be going anywhere,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  David drew in a pacifying breath, released it shakingly. “Been up long?” he asked, saying the first thing that occurred to him.

  “Since eight,” she said.

  That’s six long hours, isn’t it? he heard his mind retort. He nodded, then began to yawn before he could control it.

  “Still tired?” she asked.

  “No, I’m not still tired.”

  Her expression was unreadable. “You yawned,” she said.

  “True.” His smile was fleeting, “I do that every now and then.”

  “So I’ve noticed.” Ellen gazed into her coffee with a bleak expression.

  David breathed in deeply. He couldn’t seem to get enough air in his lungs. He frowned, realizing that he wanted another drink of water.

  “David, what is wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing.” He shifted on the chair, feeling trapped and restless. “Ellen, I just got up.” Her expression made him irritable. “All right, it’s this cottage,” he said. “We should get away from it.”

  “What difference does the location make?” she demanded. “The trouble is with us.”

  He felt a burst of fear inside himself. “It’s not” he said. “It’s this cottage.”

  Ellen shook her head. “It’s not the cottage and you know it” she told him. “It’s our marriage.” She lowered her head. “What’s left of it,” she murmured. Her hands were clasping on the table now, the fingers rigid, white.

  He felt his muscles tightening. “Do I have to spend the rest of my life in a state of penitence?” he asked.

  Ellen looked up in defiance. “Would you feel the same if it was me who’d had the affair instead of you?”

  A sense of unreality made David’s head feel numb. He knew that she was talking about Julia but, horribly, it all fit what had happened with Marianna as well. “It was not an affair,” he said. “I thought I wanted to marry her.”

  “Why didn’t you then?” She was brushing away tears as if infuriated by the weakness which had caused them.

  “Do we have to go through that again!” he asked, trying not to let himself be angry. “Do I have to say it again? All right. I will. I didn’t want to lose what you and I have together.”

  “Which is—?” she asked in a faltering voice.

  “A lot Ellen. If you’d—”

  She wouldn’t let him finish. “Call it what you like,” she said. “It was an affair.”

  “No, it wasn’t” he snapped. “Our marriage was falling apart when I met—”

  Again, she interrupted. “Why was it falling apart? Why?”

  “What difference does that make now?”

  “I want to hear!”

  “You know the reasons as well as I do. Too many hours at work. Two small children. Lack of time together. Your background, my background. What’s the difference?”

  “That’s really facing it” she said, her voice grown hard.

  “Facing what?” he demanded.

  “The fact that we are almost strangers.”

  “Oh; I see.” He felt barely able to speak. “I guess I’ve been wrong in thinking we had something all these years.”

  “Oh!” She jolted with incensed frustration, then controlled herself. “Of course, we had something,” she said, severely. “Would we have stayed together twenty-one years if there hadn’t been something? But there wasn’t enough. We never went below the surface. Now that surface is wearing thin and there’s nothing underneath to hold us up. The heart isn’t there, David; it just isn’t there. I’m going to be a grandmother. A grandmother, David. I’m not even sure I know what it is to be a wife.”

  David felt as though he’d been mysteriously transposed, replacing the man who was supposed to be sitting here, listening to these words. All he could reflect on was that Ellen minded being a grandmother. He knew that it was just a fragment of the truth but it was all he could grasp at the moment.

  “You know what I feel like?” she asked. She gazed at him accusingly. “Like a betrayed wife. A second time.”

  He was already shocked. This new blow only made his stomach muscles cramp a little more.

  “I know it isn’t true,” she said. “It’s just the way I feel. Because the kind of secrecy you used to hide your affair from me is the kind you’ve always used to hide yourself from me. I don’t know you, David. Not what’s down inside. You’re kind and gentle and—fun to be with but—I just don’t know you. Maybe that goes both ways; I suppose it does. Maybe I’m as secretive as you are. I don’t mean to be, don’t want to be but maybe I am—and maybe it’s because you never gave me the chance to tell you what I really feel. Maybe I’ve held it back because I knew you didn’t want to hear it.

  “We’ve never discussed things, Davidi Never! Not the really important things—what we are, what we believe about ourselves, about our marriage. Our relationship has been like a—an iceberg. The part that’s been exposed is just a tiny part. Most of it is still submerged. We’ve talked and we’ve talked but we’ve never really said anything, never probed or searched. We haven’t built a relationship, we’ve avoided one. We’ve been pretending with our married life instead of living it.” Her voice began to break. “I know it’s hideous for me to say this to you after twenty-one years. It makes me sick to say it—me, forty-two, you, forty-six. And here, for the first time, I’m saying it. The first time, David.”

  The stillness following was so oppressively heavy that he imagined he could feel it weighing on him. His body seemed to be carved from massive, fragile glass; he knew that it would shatter if he moved. The room appeared askew, about to tilt. Any second now, his chair would topple and he’d fall, splintering into a thousand fragments. Ellen, help me. Somewhere in the deadened hollow of his mind, a vo
ice was pleading.

  Ellen closed her eyes abruptly, pressing out tears that trickled down her cheeks. She wiped them off. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I apologize. It wasn’t very nice of me to hit you like this when you’ve just woken up.” She inhaled deeply, tremulously. “I didn’t intend to do it” she added. “I didn’t mean for it to end like this.”

  David nodded, murmuring, “I understand.” He didn’t. He felt totally disoriented, cut loose from his moorings, his mind adrift in eddies of confusion. The only thought he could retain, because it chilled him so, was that, without actually knowing about Marianna, Ellen had, somehow, sensed her existence.

  The rest of it he was unable to cope with. It was too vast, too all-encompassing. How could one begin to reappraise a relationship of twenty-one years?

  The alcove and the house seemed deathly still. The only sound was the remote, incessant boom of waves striking the shore. Both of them sat mutely, frozen in their separate isolations. Nothing more to say, David’s mind repeated several times. He knew it wasn’t so, that just the opposite was true. There was so much to talk about, it was impossible to find a starting point. Things had gone too far.

  “Well,” he said. His voice was quiet, passive. “Under the circumstances, it doesn’t make much sense to ask what you want to do today. Or tomorrow or …” His voice trailed off, he leaned back tiredly against the chair. Three thousand miles they’d traveled to renew their waning marriage, he thought and, in a matter of days, it had collapsed entirely. He swallowed, feeling cold and ill. It seemed impossible. Then again, perhaps it had been inevitable. Perhaps Marianna had only hastened what was bound to happen anyway.

  He looked up, twitching, as Ellen rose and started for the living room. “I’m going for a walk,” she said.

  He nodded, even though he knew she couldn’t see him. He watched as she picked up her camping jacket from a chair and pulled it on. She started for the front door, then stopped to look at him, her face expressionless, the pain apparent only in her eyes.

  “I put it all too harshly, I’m afraid,” she said. “It’s not as if we haven’t had a good life together. Or that you haven’t been a good husband. It’s just that … well, we’re getting older now. The children have their own lives; it’s only you and me. There should be something in our marriage to sustain us—something to cany us through these difficult years.” She shook her head. “I just don’t think there is,” she said, unhappily. “I think there’ll be another Julia.” She hurried to the door and left.

  David sat immobile, feeling paralyzed. She’s leaving me, he thought. He listened for the sound of the engine, then realized that the ignition key was in his trousers pocket upstairs. Where was she going then? For a walk, she’d said. But he couldn’t believe that she was coming back.

  He blanked his mind deliberately and stood, observing his movements as he might those of someone else while he pushed open the kitchen door, crossed to the sink and filled a glass with water. Drinking, he caught sight of Ellen through the window. She was walking along the beach in the opposite direction from the bluff. He watched her move farther and farther away, her figure shrinking imperceptibly until it was a length which he could span between a thumb and index finger. At that point, he turned away.

  Moving into the living room, he sat on the sofa and picked up the bulk of the Times, depositing it on his lap. Ellen had moved the sofa back to its original position. He couldn’t seem to recollect how it had been to push it up against the hearth and make love to her on it. Those moments seemed so long ago. It was bewildering to think that it happened only last night. Since they’d come to Logan Beach, time had become grotesquely attenuated. The moment of their arrival seemed the distant past and life in Sherman Oaks had all the aspects of an ill-remembered dream.

  David sighed and turned the first page of the news section, looking down sightlessly at the print. Never discussed anything? he thought. How could she say that? They’d talked about their families, the children, his work and aspirations, hers, life in general; so many things, he couldn’t possibly enumerate them. None of which went far below the surface though, the thought assailed.

  David shuddered. For a moment he felt terrified and lost. Then the fear was ended; he was conscious only of desire for Marianna. Why not? he thought Was he to spend the rest of his life in unresolved despair with Ellen? “To hell with that!” he muttered, slapping fiercely at the pile of newspaper sections, scattering them in all directions.

  Again, he shuddered, staring at the disarray of pages on the floor. What was wrong with him? He shook his head as if recovering from a blow. Guilt again, he thought. He nodded vengefully. By God, he was sick and tired of guilt. He recalled the icy wrenching of it in his stomach last night when he’d told Marianna that he was hers. Why shouldn’t he have told her? Why shouldn’t he be hers? Even though she’d told him, afterward, that she was only teasing about their “wedding,” why shouldn’t there be one?

  Lurching to his feet, he started for the stairs. He’d dress, find out where Marianna lived, tell her that he—

  David jerked around as someone knocked on the door. Marianna! he thought. But why should she be knocking? All the other times she’d come right in.

  Maybe the door was locked and she’d forgotten her key, he guessed as he moved across the living room. Had she been waiting down the beach, seen Ellen leaving? David reached the door and found that it was locked. He twisted the latch knob and pulled it open.

  Mrs. Brentwood returned his smile. “Good afternoon.”

  “Good afternoon.” He stared at her. She was wearing a tweed skirt and suede jacket belted at the waist, a white, silk scarf around her neck. Her cheeks were reddened by the wind.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “Fine.” His tone was undetermined. Taking her extended hand, he shook it once.

  “May I come in?”

  David started. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.” He stepped to the side. “Please; come in.” He caught the scent of her perfume as she entered. Closing the door, he turned to face her, dreading that she’d come to tell him how she’d noticed Marianna entering and leaving. “My wife’s not here right now,” he told her.

  “I know,” she said. “I saw her leaving.”

  David forced a smile. Now he was certain that she’d come to speak of Marianna. “She should be back soon,” he said.

  Without replying, Mrs. Brentwood looked around the room as though in search of something. David felt himself starting to bristle. Did she think he’d hidden Marianna in a closet or behind a chair?”

  “You want to sit—?” he started to say.

  “Here is fine” she said. She smiled at him. “Well,” she continued, “how do you like it here?”

  David held himself in check. Even if she did know something, he wasn’t going to let her trick him into verifying it. “Fine,” he answered. “It’s very pleasant.”

  “Yes.” She nodded, looking around again. A war of nerves? he thought. He forced himself to smile as she returned her gaze. “I didn’t ask last night,” she said. “It didn’t seem appropriate; but have you seen its ghost yet?”

  David’s smile went faintly quizzical. “Its what?” he asked. He was sure he hadn’t heard correctly.

  “Its ghost.”

  He blinked. “I thought that’s what you said.”

  “You haven’t seen it then?”

  David gestured toward the living room, surprised to notice that his hand was trembling. “Here?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer, looking at him warily. At last, she nodded. “Here,” she said.

  He wanted to swallow, but felt that he should not permit himself such a telltale reaction. “Well,” he said, “that’s fascinating.” He wondered why he felt so ill-at-ease about it. “You should have told us last night.”

  “I didn’t want your wife to know,” she said.

  He felt his stomach muscles quivering. “Why?”

  Again she failed to
answer, eyes unblinking, fixed on him; they frightened him somehow. “Whose ghost?” he heard himself ask.

  “You believe it then?”

  He laughed awkwardly. “Well,” he said. He gestured as though embarrassed. “I hardly know you well enough to say that you’re making it up.”

  Mrs. Brentwood’s eyes remained on his. ‘The ghost is that of a young woman,” she said.

  David stared at her without expression.

  “Don’t you want to know her name?” she asked.

  It’s Marianna isn’t it? he thought, startled at his prompt acceptance of the idea. “What?” he asked.

  “Marianna.”

  “Oh.” He nodded, two things suddenly established in his mind: One, that ghosts did not exist; two, that he had no intention of revealing anything to Mrs. Brentwood. Strengthened by the double certainty, he said, “That’s a pretty name.”

  “You’ve never heard it before?”

  “Well, not in reference to—”

  “And you haven’t seen her.”

  “Mrs. Brentwood—” David gestured, smiling with polite dubiety. “No; I haven’t” His smile grew teasing. “Are you disappointed?”

  “Yes, I am,” she said. “In you.”

  He tensed involuntarily. “I’m afraid I don’t understand that”

  ‘You don’t”

  “I don’t.” His tone verged on animosity. “Perhaps you’ll explain.”

  Her smile, though hinting at derision, seemed sincere enough to be disarming. “No,” she said, “there’s nothing to explain. If you haven’t seen her, you haven’t seen her.” She looked around again, then back at him. “Be glad you haven’t” she continued. “You would find it most unpleasant if you did.”