“You’re my wife. Aren’t you? Aren’t you my wife?”
“I’ve never loved anyone else, anyone else at all.”
They moved together, in time to music only they could hear.
No need, no need to hurry...
He let out a sound like a groan of anguish, a crow of triumph.
They lay together on the bed.
“Did you?” he said.
She stretched dreamily like a cat. “Yes.”
My beloved, my wife... My wife and I exactly fit...
He smiled idiotically up at the ceiling and went to sleep.
When he woke up he was sweating. She had piled some blankets on top of him and put a pillow under his head. His clothes were hung neatly over the back of a chair and his shoes were side by side with his socks draped over the toes. But she was gone.
He got up and turned on the light, his eyes searching the room for a trace of her. But there wasn’t even a hairpin or a sequin from her dress or a fragment of her glasses.
He looked down at his hand and saw that she’d even washed off the caked blood. He had a sudden desperate sense of loss and loneliness. She should have left something of herself, something...
It was after two o’clock but he put on his clothes and went outside.
The party was over; the cars gone; the house dark.
Chapter 15
It went on like that for a week. He got up late in the mornings and spent the rest of the day sitting around waiting until it was dark enough for her to come. He had no ambition and no desire to do anything, to start his book, or to contact some of his old friends or even to take a walk. He read a little, but usually he sat thinking about Martha, staring out between the slats of the Venetian blinds until his eyes went out of focus. Even when he looked away at something in the room, the slats remained before his eyes, like prison bars going the wrong way.
His thoughts at the beginning of the day were pleasant: she was beautiful, she belonged to him, every single pore of her skin belonged to him, she was his wife.
If, at that point, he could have gone over and talked to her or she could have come to him, he might never have reached the second stage of thinking. It was then that the question marks came to life in his head, sharp and cruel as fishhooks: What about you and Charles, my dear? How often did you go to bed with him? Sleep with him afterwards? You have a double bed, of course? Of course. Oversize, custom-built, Beautyrest mattress and guaranteed silent springs.
Bloody little fishhooks.
Was he any good in bed? Did you have the light off or on? Were you naked or did you have to tickle him a little with a fancy nightgown and some phony perfume? I like the way you smell without perfume. Your sweat is clean and sweet as a baby’s. Does Charles ever say things like that to you? What does he say? Tell me what he says, tell me all about Charles. Five years is a long time with a man. You can make a hell of a lot of love in five years, can’t you? Did you?
“No, I didn’t.” She answered that one calmly. “We didn’t get along that way very well.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t love him, I guess.”
“I read once that some women close their eyes and think about some other man. Did you think about me?”
“No. I didn’t think about anything at all.”
She didn’t seem to resent his questions or try to get out of answering them. She was patient; she didn’t point out to him how unreasonable it was for him to be wildly jealous, she didn’t once remind him that he had walked out on her.
Nor did she ask any questions. That struck him as funny.
“Aren’t you interested?” he said. “I might have had a couple of dozen women. Don’t you want to hear about them?”
“No. It would only make me feel bad.”
“I want you to feel bad.”
She smiled, rather sadly. “You’ll always have some woman crazy about you. I mustn’t let it bother me.”
Her smile and her calmness enraged him. “Goddamn it, I’ll make it bother you.” He put his hands on her throat. It was warm and vulnerable, and the pulse beat against his thumbs like tiny hearts.
His hands dropped abruptly. “I used to have a baby duck when I was a kid,” he said. “Stuffed, of course. It always used to bother me.” He gave a little laugh. “Your neck reminded me of it, it’s so soft.”
It was like that every day. He’d start out feeling good about her, and then the questions would start and the resentment and finally the violence that ended in love-making. Confused, unreal, unreasonable days, with Charles in the background, a silent, motionless shadow, but one that might start moving toward them at any hour. She said she’d heard nothing from him, she didn’t know when he was coming back or what he would do when he came back.
Toward the end of the week he went over to the house for lunch. They all acted surprised and pleased to see him.
“Welcome, stranger,” Lily said.
“What you been living on?” Mrs. Putnam said. “Air?”
“I’ve been going out for meals,” he lied.
The two women believed him. “My cooking’s not good enough for you, eh?” Mrs. Putnam said.
“Too good. I might get fat.”
Yes, both the women were innocent, he didn’t have to worry about them. It was Brown who had to be convinced.
“You don’t look so good,” Brown said. “You look pooped out.”
“I am.” Let Brown make something of that if he liked.
Brown liked. “Maybe you’ve been staying up too late nights, eh? I see your light on sometimes three, four o’clock in the morning.”
“I have insomnia. I get up and read now and then.”
“I used to have that kind of insomnia myself,” Brown said solemnly. “It hasn’t bothered me for quite a few years.”
Steve raised his eyebrows politely. “Is that so?”
“Not since I took up philosophy, in fact. Philosophy is a substitute for a number of things.”
“I’ll have to try it.”
“Brown’s an old windbag,” Mrs. Putnam stated. “He don’t know anything about philosophy. He just makes things up as he goes along.”
“Women don’t understand these matters,” Brown said with a wink at Steve.
“Oh, don’t we?”
“Women are not stupid, you understand. No, I’d be the last man on earth to claim that women are stupid. They are simply reluctant to learn.”
Mrs. Putnam’s feelings were hurt. She didn’t offer anyone a second helping and she sipped her tea in silence as thick as dough.
Steve changed the subject. “Has anyone heard when Mr. Pearson’s coming back?”
“Not exactly,” Brown said, with a wouldn’t-you-like-to-know grin. “I just heard he was getting along fine, the country air is doing him good.”
“It’s getting away from her that’s doing him the good,” Lily said.
“Don’t gossip,” Mrs. Putnam warned her.
“That isn’t gossip, it’s...”
“It is so. It’s biting the hand that feeds you.”
“She don’t feed me, he does.”
Steve lit a cigarette, feeling suddenly a little weak and sick. He wasn’t used to full meals anymore, that was it. Or maybe it was the reference to Martha and the malice in Lily’s voice and the talk about biting hands. Charles had bitten Martha’s hand, but no one mentioned that. Whatever was said was in Charles’s favor. He had no faults, he was the god of the backstairs.
“Nobody seems to like Mrs. Pearson very much,” Steve said.
The women exchanged glances.