She rose suddenly. “I hope I haven’t tired you, Charley.”
“Not at all.”
“Martha should be home soon.”
“I don’t mind being alone. She doesn’t have to stay home on my account. I wish, in fact, that she’d go out more than she does. I wish you’d tell her that.”
“I will.” But she departed hurriedly as if this was a subject she was anxious to avoid.
Charles lay down again. He did want Martha to go out, that part was true. But he also wanted her to miss him all the time she was out, to be in a great hurry to get home again, and to tell him when she returned everything she had said and done. She wouldn’t volunteer any information, but if he questioned her thoroughly he would eventually find out what stores she had shopped at, what clerks had waited on her, what people she had met. His desire for such information was motivated not by jealousy or by a need to live vicariously through her experiences but by the delusion that the more he knew about Martha the more completely he would possess her.
He remembered vaguely one of Grimm’s fairy tales about a girl who owned a tree that grew golden apples and silver leaves. No one else could pluck the apples, but when the girl herself reached out, they fell into her hands. Some day he would look up a copy of Grimm and find out the rights of the story. Meanwhile, it continued to worry him. He felt that his life with Martha had been spent standing under a tree of golden apples he could not pluck, and that some day someone else might come along and the fruit would fall into his hands. The true and rightful owner — was she waiting for him? — was she hoarding the apples deliberately?
No, it was impossible. There was no tree. There was no warmth or love in Martha. It was her body that misled you. The curving hips and voluptuous breasts invited the touch, and you had to touch them repeatedly before you learned they were plaster props. Plaster breasts like a cast covering a broken heart.
Broken, he thought. I wonder why I said broken? Nobody could have broken Martha’s heart. I knew her first. There was no one else.
All the same it worried him. To take his mind off the subject he began to count the number of leaves in each ridge of the wallpaper. Finally his eyes wandered back to the windows and he saw that the sun had reached and passed the left curtain, and that the time for decision was gone.
He had a moment of panic. There was still time, still time to decide, to do something, anything.
The only thing he could think of doing was sitting up in bed and swinging his feet over the edge. He was sweating, and his pajamas clung to his back and along his ribs, emphasizing his frailness. He saw himself in the mirror across the room. He certainly did not look like the true and rightful owner of any golden apples. A shave might help, and a grey pinstripe suit with a navy-blue tie. Very well, he would get dressed, and what’s more, he would shave himself.
His feet fumbled for his slippers. He reached for the bathrobe that Martha had folded at the foot of his bed, and stood up. He was shaking so badly that he couldn’t get his arms into the sleeves of the robe. He struggled, the robe dragging on the floor, twitching as if it were alive and determined to resist him.
After a minute he stood quiet, helpless, in the grip of a new and terrible fear. He was afraid to die. Up to this time he had been too ill to care much about it, living had seemed so much trouble. But now that he was on his feet again he must stay there, he must exercise that sick old man in the mirror. He must stop playing his little game of hints and ironies and come right out and ask Martha.
No, not ask her. Tell her. Tell her he knew.
He leaned over and picked up the bathrobe and put it on. Then he straightened his shoulders and looked once more, challengingly, into the mirror. He felt calmer. Everything’s going to be all right, he thought.
He walked toward the door without knowing exactly where he wanted to go or what he wanted to do. It was good to be in motion, to be independent. It meant he was no longer a victim, but a man capable of victimizing.
He went out into the hall. A maid in a green uniform was dusting the banister with sketchy haste. She was about thirty, with nice eyes and bad skin.
“Hello, Lily,” he said.
She turned, startled. “Why, Mr. Pearson. Why, my goodness!”
“Thought I’d take a little walk around,” he said, smiling, “see how you were all getting along without me.”
Lily had a secret passion for Charles and his presence had the effect of alternately choking off her voice entirely or putting wheels under her tongue. In private she frequently planned things to say to him, but when the time came she forgot them all. This occasion of his first appearance after his illness was to have been the scene of many suave and pretty sentences. She couldn’t remember one of them.
Mute, and on the point of tears, she twisted the duster around her fingers and wished that the floor would open up and swallow her.
Charles, who understood ordinary women quite well, glanced away and said cheerfully, “How’s your mother getting along, Lily? Brown told me she was in an accident.”
“Oh — she’s fine — she’s just fine.”
“That’s good.” He noticed that Martha’s door was closed. “Well, don’t let me interrupt you, Lily. I’m just getting re-acquainted with the house.”
Martha’s door, blank, imperturbable, like a royal sentry standing guard over the secrets of the princess’s bedroom.
Then he saw that it wasn’t quite blank. It was equipped with a golden eye, and a brand-new Yale lock. He turned, groaning, back to Lily.
“Burglars,” she said with a gasp.
“Burglars?”
“I mean — there might be, so she had a man come last week and put it on, on account of burglars.”
“Oh,” he said, as if he’d known all about it, had even suggested the idea himself. But the golden eye winked at him, and he felt suddenly exhausted and had to put his hand against the wall to steady himself.
Lily gazed at him with love and agony in her eyes. This was her love, her Mr. Pearson who moved naked and bold and humble through her dreams, and all she could talk about was burglars. Oh, if the floor would open up...
“Oh, yes, there is a great deal of crime in the city, a great deal,” Charles said, and slid slowly down the wall.
“Oh, Mr. Pearson! Brown! Oh, Brown!”
Her screams came to Charles muffled in cotton wool, and clung to his ears soft and sticky as rumors.
His ears were smothering, he would never be able now to go out among the people of the world. There would be war, poverty, crime, and a Yale lock on every door. The people would grieve in whispers: Charles Pearson will never come this way now; we wait, but he will never come. His wife won’t let him.
He blinked and found he was back in bed and Brown was holding out a glass of water to him.
“You haven’t got much sense,” Brown said. “Drink this. How do you feel now?”
“Fine,” Charles whispered.
Brown helped him raise his head. “I fainted like that the first time I got up after my operation.”
“That makes it all right then,” Charles said. Some of the water slid out of the side of his mouth and down his neck, but it didn’t matter. He felt light-headed and detached, as if the Charles Pearson who had fainted ignominiously in the hall had nothing to do with himself, was, in fact, rather a comic fellow, born to be a butt.
“It seems to me you don’t have much sense,” Brown said. “That’s my opinion.”
“Well, don’t nag.”
“I’m not nagging. Dr. MacNeil said you were only to get up and sit quietly in a chair the first few days.”
“He didn’t tell me that.”