She, the businesswoman who said “As soon as you lose your temper you’ve lost the argument,” who had never raised her voice to him, who had seemed the soul of calmness, turned out to be a screamer, the veins in her neck standing out like blue twisted cords as she howled at him. And then, after all this noise, she would sulk and say nothing — she could sulk for days with a stubbornness that would have actually impressed him with its resolve had it not been such a maddening provocation.
“Say something,” he would plead at these times, trying to encourage her, and he would end up shouting at her, his frustration seeming to give her satisfaction in her spitefulness, for he had proved he was a brute.
“See, you’re raising your voice,” she said in a triumphant tone, having infuriated him. “You’re shouting. You’re swearing.”
What he had seen was not what he had gotten: he had married a placid, mildly agreeable woman and he had gotten a shrill, unpredictable woman who was impossible to please. It was as though he had taken the simple complacent face of a new clock to be the clock itself. He had not guessed its guts and workings could be so complex and unpredictable, with all the cogs and springs and teeth and noise that made it run, and sometimes it was just a clock face, a pretty dial with unreliable hands that did not run at all.
“It’s you,” she said, and she blamed him for being difficult. A writer, a traveler, the two selfish professions combined into a single act of egomania.
What could he say to that? His book was done but not yet published.
Charlotte’s objections to his behavior were precisely his objections to hers. And so they were equal adversaries. Still they made love, and sex took on a cruel unexpectedness with their underlying antagonism; while it lasted it was satisfying for being vicious. For a time, whenever they had an argument they were gripped by a passion that turned sexual, and they ended up on the floor or the sofa, her clothes torn and twisted aside, his pants at his ankles, while she clawed him and struggled, his body smacking hers in furious slaps. Afterward, lying motionless, with the fish-stink of sex on their skin, stuck together with sweat, all their anger burned away, the stalemate resumed.
At last he realized that he was an irritant to her and the whole relationship was unfixable, for she was unhappy, and she had been unhappy long before he’d met her. What she needed he could not offer her.
“It’s you but it’s not your fault.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“Okay, I won’t. You’ve got a borderline personality disorder.”
“What about you?”
“Of course I do. Isn’t it the human condition?”
He had made her very unhappy. Her sadness was a great deal different from her anger. It was heavy and silent; it killed his desire. He did not think of making love to her now, not even in the drooling doggy way he had done just a week before. She was gloomy, and he left her to her unhappiness. It was either that or accommodate it.
Though she was still passive and low, she claimed she was angry, that she felt abandoned.
“You’re the same person,” he said. He meant: I don’t know you — you’re a stranger that emerged from the body of a friend whom I had found familiar and even beautiful. I was able to fuck the body but not the person inside it.
“You’re a bastard.”
Meaningless abuse; he was capable of the same. It was another stage in the disintegration.
But it seemed to him that she wanted to hold him responsible. It was almost as if she had been looking for a husband in order to find someone to take on the burden of misery within her, which had been part of her since childhood.
Dishonestly, he had wanted to sigh Women! as she had often shouted Men! But that was ridiculous. “We are not raccoons,” he had said to her one day. It was unfair to see her only as a woman, for she was different from any other woman he had ever known. She was Charlotte and sometimes Charlie. They had tried. They had failed.
Trying to analyze her didn’t help. The attempt made him insincerely sympathetic and seemed to obligate him. She talked about her parents, and it seemed like a weird parable of perverse and cruel people: hag of a mother, bully of a father, brute of a brother, who had done everything except love her. He hated listening, for whenever she talked of these people he saw damage. The worst of it was that since she really did not like herself very much, how could she love anyone else?
Yet she had friends, all of them women, none he knew well, for she kept them to herself and, he suspected, secretly complained about him to them. He could tell from the way they treated him — distantly, coolly, sometimes mocking, sometimes loudly contemptuous — that they were acting on her behalf.
Her closest friend was Vickie. In one of Charlotte’s low periods Vickie came to stay for a week. He suspected a week would be too long, that it might undo him, but he made attempts to be conversational.
“Have you ever been to the Vineyard before?”
“Years ago.”
“When was that?”
Vickie couldn’t remember. It had to be a lie. He asked her what sort of work she did.
“Depends on the day.”
She was being elusive. He knew Vickie was a marketing manager from Los Angeles. Charlotte had said so. They were both part of a business plan that was being written. Vickie had a long-term relationship with a man in New York. Steadman asked about him. “He’s delightfully eccentric.” Charlotte had told him the man was very wealthy and that Vickie was wealthy, too, but all Steadman saw was an aging sharp-faced woman who had a demented male friend and who had shown up empty-handed and contradicted nearly everything he said.
“Beautiful,” she said of a small santo on a pedestal, its gilt chipped. “I was going to buy one in Mexico.”
“This is from the Philippines.”
“Mexicans make the exact same things,” she said. “You’re limping.”
“Gout,” he said.
“Gout’s terrible. Sometimes you can’t get out of bed. You get gout in every joint.”
“That’s not it. Have you ever had it?”
“No, but I know quite a bit about it.”
Wondering why he was going to the trouble, Steadman explained 216 that you never got gout in every joint. He had been severely dehydrated on his travels and had fainted one day in Assam, before trespassing into Bangladesh. The resulting kidney damage had produced the gout. Gout was nearly always limited to one joint, often the podagra of the large toe of one foot.
“It’s like having a broken toe.”
“Oh, is that all?” Vickie said, and turned to Charlotte. “I had a broken toe when I was a dancer. It didn’t hurt at all.”
“This hurts.”
“If you’d drunk more water,” Vickie said, “you wouldn’t have gotten dehydrated.”
Steadman smiled, raging within.
“This was in India.”
“They’re starving in India,” Vickie said.
“Have you been to India?”
She averted her eyes. “Years ago.”
She stayed in the guesthouse; she whispered with Charlotte, whom she called Charlie; they shopped in town. Steadman saw them only at mealtimes. Though she was a snob about food—“Avocados are really fattening,” “Fruit juice is all sugar,” “You don’t have any soy milk?”—she didn’t cook. Vickie wouldn’t swim in his pool — she hated pools, all those chemicals. When he offered her blueberries in a bowl she said she hated blueberries, and so he followed up with raspberries and she shrieked, saying she hated them even more. “They’re so hairy.” She said she wanted to give up business and be a masseuse. She often massaged Charlotte’s neck as she talked. “You’re all tight here. Why are you so tense, Charlie? These knots. Feel them? Let me work on those.” Steadman wondered why he had never massaged his wife’s neck. Vickie said her ambition was to live in a deluxe hotel, preferably in Europe, maybe in Vienna. She had been there once, it was so clean, better than Italy, where they threw trash everywhere.