“No.” He was pretty sure now that what the doctor had suggested was true—the pains weren’t caused by his injuries, they appeared only when he was challenged and couldn’t meet the challenge and needed an excuse for not being able to meet it.
“I think,” he said finally, “that I’ll wash the car.”
“Dear Charles,” Martha wrote. “You still haven’t sent me your address so I presume that means you don’t want to hear from me. But I can write anyway. I will give this letter to Dr. MacNeil and you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. I have no news or anything to tell you, but I wanted to say that I am very sorry . . .”
She paused, the pen seemed to grow limp in her hand. “I am very sorry . . .” I am very sorry I met you.
She stared out of the window of her bedroom at the flowers, the hedges, the rolling lawn. It didn’t look like grass from here, but like sheets of velvet. Her eyes softened, as if her mind had slipped away for a moment to lie down on the velvet and dream.
I am sorry, sorry.
She turned away and stiffened her fingers around the pen.
“. . . that we have drifted so far apart that you can believe me capable of anything. I loved you, Charles . . .”
Someone was walking around the side of the garage. Steve.
“. . . and I thought you loved me. MacNeil told me you still do. If you do, why do you keep on being suspicious of me? I’ve never done anything to deserve it.”
Not walking, exactly. Gliding. He had always walked like that, as if he were keeping time to music no one else could hear.
She fastened her eyes to the paper. “I really tried to be a good wife to you. I don’t know where I went wrong. If I knew my mistakes I could correct them. Perhaps there was too great a difference between our environments. I wasn’t brought up the way you were.”
When she looked out again, Steve had disappeared. He’s gone, she thought in sudden panic, he won’t come back. She must rap on the window and call out to him.
“You must realize, Charles, how hard I tried to accustom myself to a new way of life and how humiliating it was sometimes. We didn’t have any money, you see.”
We, not my father and Mother and Laura and I. But we, Steve and I. She hesitated, trying to decide whether to stroke the sentence out. Charles had such a sly way of guessing at things, he might wonder about the “we.” But if she stroked it out, he would wonder even more. She could see him bending over the paper, trying to decipher the crossed-out letters one by one, his face white with suspicion.
She laid down her pen and reached down and opened the window. Summer sounds filtered in through the screen, the jangle of insects, the throbbing hysterical screech of tree toads. A spider minced elegantly across the window ledge. A housefly paused a moment on the screen. In the fall he’d be slow and sleepy, wanting only to be let alone to drowse like an old man; but now he was alert, quickened with spring, and she had only to wave her hand a little and away he fled, lightly, contemptuous of her ponderous movements. Where are you going? Ah, I’m not going anywhere. You have to go somewhere. Not I!
She followed him with her eyes but he darted up, up, going nowhere.
She heard the hum of a motor and saw the car backing out of the garage. Steve climbed out of the car and began uncoiling the garden hose. He was wearing a pair of shorts, nothing else.
She put the letter to Charles back in the box of notepaper. Then she went downstairs and out across the lawn.
He didn’t see or hear her coming. The splutter of water from the hose was too loud, and he was intent on his work.
She said loudly, “Steve.”
He jumped and turned. The stream of water missed her by inches.
“Oh, sorry.”
“Turn it off.”
“All right.”
He shut the water off and put the hose down. When he bent over the muscles of his back moved like snakes under silk. There was a brown mole beneath his left shoulder blade.
He stood up straight again and faced her.
She stepped back. “Who told you to do that?”
“Nobody.”
“I—your costume is a little informal, isn’t it?”
“So is the job.”
“The neighbors might see you. It wouldn’t make a very good impression.”
“I don’t see any neighbors.”
“Are you—are you arguing with me?”
He shook his head. He seemed docile, but he was watching her in an oddly insolent way.
“If you really want to wash the car,” she said, “you’d better put on something more suitable. A raincoat and rubber boots, perhaps.”
“Perhaps.” A trickle of sweat ran down from his neck and disappeared in the little clump of hair in the middle of his chest. He scratched himself without self-consciousness. The hair looked moist and silky.
“You’re deliberately thinking up ways to annoy me.”
“No, I’m not,” he said earnestly.
“It looks like it. You should know that people who live in this section of the city don’t go around in shorts.”
“I’ve never been around such class before. It’ll take me a while to catch on.”
“I’m sure there’s a raincoat somewhere that you can wear.”
“And rubber boots? Oh, goody.” Without changing his expression he added, “Remind me to slap your puss some day for that section-of-the-city crack.”
He walked away.
“You come back here,” she said.
He went into the garage without answering. After a moment’s doubt she followed him.
“You can’t talk to me like that,” she said. “Not if you want to stay here.”
“My rent is paid. You’ll have to give me an eviction notice. You probably didn’t think of that angle when you hatched your fancy little idea for getting back at me.”
“You can’t stay if I order you to leave.”
He smiled. “These legal niceties are too subtle for your brain, Martha. No, I think I’ll stay for a time. I want to investigate life in the upper brackets. Anything for a laugh, I always say.”
There was a long silence.
“Well,” she said at last, “I’m glad you’re having a good laugh.” The garage was murky after the bright sunlight, and she could scarcely see him. “Am I that funny?”
“You’re a scream, darling.”
“Well. Thank you.”
“That’s all right. When people ask me, I tell them.” He spoke quietly and without emotion. “Do you want to see something, Martha? Come here.”
She didn’t move.
“It’s just a picture,” he said, “of a girl who looks a lot different now. I’ve carried it around with me for years.”
He came toward her holding out the picture.
“I don’t want to see it.” But she looked anyway and saw herself laughing into the camera.
“Pretty, isn’t she?” Steve said. “I was crazy about her. I still am.”
“Don’t. Don’t talk like that.”
“It’s all right. I was talking about her, not about you. I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.”
She stepped forward, raising her arm as if to ward off more words. He caught her wrist and held it.
“Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to hurt you,” she said contemptuously.
“I wanted to be sure,” he said. “You’re a pretty big girl, you could pack a pretty big wallop.”
“You’ve probably been slapped by quite a few women.”
“Not so many.”
“Let go of me.”
He stared at her a minute. Then he held up her wrist between his thumb and forefinger and let it drop suddenly.
“You’d better start thinking about that eviction notice, Martha, because I think I’m going t
o stick around for a while.”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t want me to. Besides, I like it here. The atmosphere is so friendly.”
“I’m so glad you like it.”
“Let’s put it this way,” he said, turning his head away and speaking in an impersonal manner. “I want you to have your little revenge, if that’s what you can call it. I want you to get everything off your chest. Then we’ll start over.”
“We’ll . . . ? I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re preposterous!”
“And don’t bring up the subject of Charles. I don’t give a damn about Charles. I wouldn’t walk a block to see Charles wearing nothing but his hives.”
“I warn you, you’re not going to mess up my life again. I’m perfectly happy and I’m going to stay that way.”
“I see. Everything’s just dandy between you and Charles, is it?”
“Yes.”
“And when he gets better, he’s going to come home and you’re going to be right there at the door to welcome him and take up where you left off?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you’ll change your mind.”
“Why should I?”
“It’s funny, but I have the impression that you don’t like him very much.”
“I love him very much.”
“Say it again.”
“I love him very much.”
“Again.”
“Damn you,” she said quietly.
When she reached her room she felt exhausted and in pain, as if someone had stripped off a layer of her skin and exposed the raw stuff underneath.
“Charles,” she wrote. “I am afraid. I want you to come home.”
11
The next day the doctor went out to see Charles. He asked very few questions. He let Charles talk for nearly two hours, about his childhood, his mother, Martha, any little incident that occurred to him. It was only when Charles appeared too tired to continue talking that MacNeil inquired about his physical symptoms.
“Migraine still bothering you, Pearson?”
“No, it’s gone.”
“Good. Forbes looking after you all right?”
“Yes.”
“He tells me you’re eating well.”
“I am.”
“You’re feeling generally pretty good then?”
“I’m fine,” Charles said without conviction.
He hadn’t any pain, but a numbness had settled in his limbs. He lay for hours in a deck chair on the porch, muffled in sweaters and blankets, watching the lake. The constant motion of the water seemed to paralyze him, he hardly breathed. In his shroud of blankets, with his staring eyes, he looked so much like a dead man that Forbes would come out now and then to reassure himself.
“Mr. Pearson, you want your cap?”
A fretful stir under the blankets. “What?”
“Do you want your cap?”
“Cap? No. Nothing.”
A little ashamed of his apprehensions, Forbes would go back into the cottage and resume reading his book on herb cookery. Reading about food relaxed him. He was no longer young and he felt the strain of being with a sick man all the time—not the physical strain, for Charles didn’t require much care, but the mental strain of never quite knowing what to expect. Though he liked Charles, he didn’t have the sentimental fondness for him that Brown had and he had pretty well made up his mind that when the time came for Charles to return home, he wasn’t going along. He hadn’t told Charles, but Charles seemed to have guessed it as he guessed a great many things. Forbes didn’t know whether it was intuition or whether Charles simply was more observant than ordinary people.
While Dr. MacNeil was there, Forbes stayed inside the cottage, trying not to eavesdrop. But as soon as the doctor left, Forbes went out to the porch again. Charles was sitting with an unopened letter lying in his lap.
“Anything you want, Mr. Pearson?”
“No, thanks. Just leave me alone for a little while.”
“All right.”
Charles looked at the letter with resentment because it had intruded on his privacy. She had followed him even here—she had no decency, no sense . . .
“Dear Charles.” How strangely incongruous her writing was, he thought. Timid, fearful little letters bunched together as if for protection. The capitals were hardly larger than the other letters. He wondered why he’d never noticed this before and whether it meant anything.
When he finished reading the letter, he looked out over the lake again. “I am afraid, I want you to come home.” The sincerity of the words was obvious. Even her writing had changed at this point; it was larger and so erratic that it seemed each letter must have been made by a different person.
Afraid? Naturally she was. She was afraid of gossip, of her reputation. It was not her fear that was extraordinary, it was her confession of it, and, above all, her appeal to him. She never appealed to him for anything. She might make a request, but if he refused, she took his refusal as final, she didn’t coax or become coy or tearful. It was one of the traits he admired in her, yet it was also the one that hurt him most—she didn’t consider it worthwhile to manage him or jolly him along or even to quarrel with him. The face she presented to him was invulnerable: You can’t help or hurt me, Charles. There seemed to be no way of getting at her, or penetrating the layers of coldness which protected her from any emotional involvement with other people, even her own husband. This was her stock-in-trade, a complete lack of reaction which made people feel inadequate and ineffectual.
She is invulnerable, Charles thought, because I can get no reaction from her but a cold acceptance of cold facts. And the invulnerability is not so much a particular quality in her, but the particular quality in other people which makes human reactions necessary to them. Few of us can realize we are alive unless we read it in the faces of others. A smile, a frown, a lifted eyebrow, a kiss, an exclamation—these are the signs, and not our own heartbeats, that we are alive. So what people like Martha do is to strike at our instinct for self-preservation and make us afraid. We are both afraid, Martha.
But why the sudden confession? Had she simply wakened up one morning and realized that she was getting nothing from life and that her youth and beauty were slipping slowly into the past? She had never before given any sign of such a realization. She spent her days as if she had already lived her life and was merely marking time until the end. She worked in the garden, she dusted books and emptied ashtrays, she went to an occasional movie with Laura or out to dinner with him. She didn’t enjoy going out to dinner, she was always ill-at-ease and ate scarcely anything. This had puzzled him, for at home she had a good appetite. It took him some time to discover that she was shy about eating in public. No, it was more than shyness, it was a kind of shame, as if she hated to let other people know that she, too, was subject to the demands of the body.
Or perhaps it was merely that she wasn’t accustomed to eating in restaurants. “You must realize, Charles, how hard I tried to accustom myself to a new way of life and how humiliating it was sometimes.”
That much was true. She had worked hard and persistently but she had worked to make herself into the kind of wife she thought he should have, not the kind he wanted. Once, at the beginning of their marriage, he had intimated that he liked her the way she was and didn’t want her to change.
She had looked at him in bewilderment and disbelief. “But I’ve got so much to learn. I don’t want to disgrace you.”
He laughed. “Where on earth do you get your ideas, Martha? From Henry James?”
She knew who Henry James was, but she hadn’t read him. The scene, which had begun with a declaration of love, had ended up with her reading aloud from The Ambassadors.
Lord, he thought, I shoul
d have grabbed her. I should have smacked her over the head with the damn book and made love to her.
Instead, he had gone to sleep. When he woke up, she was still reading, and though she must have known he’d been asleep she didn’t say anything about it. She ignored it in the way you ignored the social lapses of a guest—a belch, a yawn, a dropped dish. Yet he had the feeling that her behavior wasn’t prompted by good manners but was intended, instead, as a denial of intimacy.
She treated him, most of the time, with a formality that made him too conscious of the difference in their ages. The difference was only nine years, and shouldn’t have mattered. But it rankled with Charles. His sterility made him oversensitive and overcritical of himself, and he worried constantly over the fact that he had married a healthy woman so much younger than himself and couldn’t even give her any children.
His attitude toward her became more and more apologetic. When he went to her room at night he always knocked at the door and waited for her permission to come in. If she intimated that she was tired or had a headache, he left immediately without kissing her good night, feeling that he had blundered in some way and that she despised him for being sterile.
On the occasions when he did stay, however, she was helpful and cooperative, so cooperative that it was months before he understood that she was modest to the point of morbidity, that it was agony for her to undress in front of him. He couldn’t understand why anyone with so beautiful a body should be ashamed of it.
“You’re lovely,” he told her. “You’re perfectly lovely.”
“No, no, I’m not.”
“You’re the most beautiful woman . . .”
“No.” She closed her eyes and turned away from him.
“Stay like that a minute,” he said. “You remind me of a painting I’ve seen. It’s a Venus by Velasquez, in the National Gallery in London.”
“Don’t be silly, Charles,” she said sharply.
The next day he bought a reproduction of Velasquez’s Venus and took it home to her. She liked the picture, but told him flatly that it was absurd of him to think she looked like that.
The picture helped, however. Martha seemed a little less embarrassed in front of him, and not so brusque when he paid her compliments. She still didn’t believe them, but he got the impression she was more ready to be convinced.
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