She began to laugh again, with genuine amusement this time.
“I didn’t realize I’d become so funny,” Charles said with a stiff little smile. “You never used to laugh at me, not unless I broke an ankle or caught my hand in a lawn mower, that being the only sort of thing that would appeal to your macabre and practically non-existent sense of humor.”
“That’s more like it, Charles. Now you’re talking natural again.”
“Thank you. What is ‘natural’?”
“You know, ironic and rather nasty. I like you better that way. I can’t stand these happy, happy moods of yours when you go around starry-eyed and full of hope.”
“But I am full of hope,” he said quietly. “I can change my dialogue if it will make me seem more natural, but I can’t change the way I feel.” He paused. “Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. You always act like this when you’re hungry.”
Her mouth opened in amazement. “Act like what?”
“Uncontrolled and shrill.”
“Uncontroll—”
He raised his voice. “Forbes, bring the soup in. Mrs. Pearson is starving.”
Forbes brought the soup in and then scurried back to the kitchen like a cockroach. It was obvious that he had heard every word of the conversation and that he didn’t want his presence to interrupt it.
“Have a cracker,” Charles said.
“I will not.”
“Do you mind if I do?”
“You’re the most impossible man. One minute you’re full of hope, and the next minute you’re calling me names.”
“I didn’t call you any names. I merely pointed out the fact that when you’re hungry you have no control over your emotions. Eat your soup.”
“I don’t want any. I prefer to go on being uncontrolled and shrill.”
“All right, but I’ve only got one more clean handkerchief. The laundry hasn’t come back yet.” He helped himself to another cracker. “Which reminds me of another small point. Do you have any handkerchiefs of your own?”
“Why?”
“Because every time you want to blubber, you blubber into mine.”
She glanced at him doubtfully, wondering why he was lying. She had never before borrowed one of his handkerchiefs and she couldn’t recall that she had ever cried in his presence.
She told him so, but he merely looked at her, smiling, and after a minute she realized that he was lying, haphazardly, saying the first thing that came into his head because she had wanted him to change his dialogue.
She picked up her spoon and began to eat, feeling defeated. Though the issue was small, a mere matter of words, Charles had outwitted her. She was doing and had done, in fact, exactly what he wanted her to: she had agreed that he was to come home, she was sitting here having lunch with him, and she was making a fool of herself. Charles was too profound and intricate for her. She could not erect a barricade against him because she never knew what road he would take. He had all kinds of devious little detours and he would pop up one and down another and be waiting for her at their destination, fresh, composed and somewhat amused at her laborious plodding in a straight line.
He reacted to everything — a gesture, a look, a silence that lasted too long or a word too quickly spoken — and his reactions were always complex. When Charles became displeased, it was not a simple matter, as it was with Steve, of losing his temper and swearing, and then apologizing. Steve was direct and comprehensible — somebody said or did the wrong thing and made him mad. But Charles’s anger seemed to come from inside himself. It germinated independently of exterior circumstances or other people; it was born without any reason except that the period of gestation was up; it died suddenly, without cause, and it was buried stealthily, without a name.
They finished their lunch in silence. She felt Charles’s eyes on her as she ate, but what emotion lay in wait behind them she couldn’t tell. He may have been contemplating her with pleasure or enjoying her appetite, condemning her foolishness or merely attempting to understand her, with a perplexity that equaled her own.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked abruptly.
“Aspirin tablets.”
Her mouth went tight. “I see.”
“I don’t believe you do.”
“Oh, I knew we’d have to go into it sometime...”
“We’re not going to go into it the way you mean. Look, Martha.”
“I won’t. I’m going home. I’m sorry I came.”
“All I want you to do is to see what I have in my hand.”
She turned. He was holding half a tablet between his thumb and forefinger.
“It’s aspirin,” he said. “I’m going to take it.”
“It will only make you sick. Stop trying to show off.”
“I’m not showing off. I want to prove something.”
“Prove what?” Doubts and suspicions gathered in her mind like an angry mob and burst suddenly into violence. She knocked the tablet out of his hand. It bounced into a glass of water, dissolving as it sank to the bottom. She shouted, “Forbes! Forbes!”
He was at the door in an instant.
“I want you to hear this, Forbes. He was going to take an aspirin while I was alone in the room with him, so he’d have more evidence against me.” She turned back to Charles, breathing hard. “Isn’t that right, Charles? Isn’t that what you wanted? All this business about loving me and wanting to come home again, it was all a pretence, a trap for me, wasn’t it?”
The two men were silent.
“Well, why don’t you admit it?” she cried. “The two of you probably cooked it up between you, maybe the doctor was in it, too! I was to be here alone with you when you became ill, I was to be caught in the act this time!”
“He takes aspirin every three or four hours,” Forbes said in a rather bored voice. “He practically lives on the damn things.”
“Martha,” Charles said.
She sat down, bowing her head. The mob dispersed, wandering aimlessly in all directions. Its anger had been spent, leaving no substitute.
“If you distrust me so deeply,” he said, “I must deserve it somehow. I wish I could change that, make you regard me as a friend.”
“You’re no friend of mine.”
“Do I go now and wash the dishes,” Forbes said, “or do I stick around and act as referee?”
“I don’t like the way he talks,” Martha said.
Forbes raised his eyebrows at Charles. “She doesn’t like the way I talk, so I’ll go and do the dishes.”
He went, muttering under his breath.
“How can you allow him...”
“Wait a minute, Martha. Before you say anything about Forbes, you may as well know he’s not working for me anymore, and he’s not coming home with me when I go. He’s only staying here with me now for some obscure reason of his own.”
“Because you have no one else you can trust. That’s his reason. He told me so himself.”
“Nonsense, there are a great many people I can trust implicitly — you and Laura and...”
“Forbes doesn’t think so. He hates me, that’s the real reason he’s not coming back.”
“He doesn’t hate you,” Charles said patiently. “He likes to make you believe he hates you. You don’t understand Forbes. He’s a lonely man. He has no family and no friends, and none of the excitements and delights and calamities that go with them. He lives off other people, a kind of emotional parasitism. For instance, you should see him when I take my aspirin every four hours. He stands there quite prepared to have me drop dead on the spot.” He smiled. “He wouldn’t exactly like it if I did, but the possibility of it flavors his existence.”