“Thousands,” he said quickly.
“I don’t know what line you hand them all, probably the same one you handed me. ‘You are my beloved, my wife.’ Your wife, my foot!”
Her viciousness caught him off guard. He felt a little sick, as if she’d suddenly hit him in the stomach when he was expecting a kiss.
He conjured up the ghost of a smile. “Did I say that? I must have been — must have been plastered.”
“Well, I never believed any of it, thank Heaven! Not even for a minute.” She mimicked his tone. ‘You must take certain things on trust, Martha, for a certain length of time.’ You and your damned talk!”
Denial was useless, but he couldn’t stop himself saying, in an incredulous voice, “You must have believed me. I meant it.”
She didn’t hear him. “You and your two-bedroom apartment! It’d be all right for you, certainly. You’d never come near the place unless you were hard up. Imagine anyone trying to domesticate you... you... you stallion!”
She stopped with her mouth open, as if she had shocked herself into silence.
“Stallions,” he said in a flat voice, “are so domesticated that they can no longer have sex relations with a mare without the aid of people. Jackrabbit would be a better name. Or stoat. There’s only one name for you, though. You’re a bitch.”
She began to cry, holding her face tight against the sleeve of his coat.
“Now you’re a crocodile,” he said, quite gently.
“I don’t know — why I said those things — I...”
“You said them because you thought them.”
“No, no. I...”
“And you’re confused, darling. We’re both confused.” His mouth touched her hair. “We’re caught in a trap and we can’t get out without hurting ourselves. But it doesn’t matter, don’t cry, it doesn’t matter. We’ll get out. Don’t worry. We’ll go away together.” He stroked her hair. “We’ll go away before Charles comes back. You don’t have to have an apartment. We could get a house. Would you like that, darling?”
She rubbed her face up and down his coat sleeve in agreement. “A house...”
“Charles will give you a divorce. He won’t try to keep you if he knows you love somebody else. As you do, don’t you?”
She nodded again.
“A house in the country, maybe, where you could have a garden. You like gardens, don’t you? And look, you don’t have to have a kid if you don’t want to, if you’re afraid it would grow up like me.” He smiled, feeling the sting of tears in his eyes. “Don’t cry, darling, everything’s going to be swell. We’ll have a wonderful life.”
They both believed it for a whole minute.
“She’ll be surprised,” Charles said. “Don’t you think she’ll be surprised, Forbes?”
“Yeah, I do.” Forbes kept his eyes on the road ahead. His hands were gentle on the steering wheel. It was the last time he would drive the little car, and he was saying goodbye to it as if it were his dog, reassuring it by petting, and wondering if the new owners would be kind to it and feed it properly. The car had been as real a factor in his life as if it had had blood instead of oil running through its veins. He had treated it right; it was healthy and full of beans, and though its heart was mechanical and could be stopped at will, it couldn’t always be started at will. It beat for some people and not for others. Pearson, for instance, couldn’t handle the car any better than he could his wife. His manner toward them both was too timid and half-hearted, as if he expected them to meet him halfway.
“Maybe you should have phoned her,” Forbes said. “Women don’t like to be surprised.”
“Don’t they?” Charles murmured.
“Not that I know anything about it, but I read once, women don’t like to be surprised.”
Charles was amused. Whenever Forbes talked of women, he herded them all together, threw a rope around them and retreated to a safe distance to observe. At that distance they lost their distinctions and became as mysteriously active and alike as a box of ants. Forbes had once read or been told that women didn’t like to be surprised, and he accepted it as a fact because it made as much sense as anything else about a group of people as completely incomprehensible to him as women.
“Some of them do,” Charles said absently.
They had reached the outskirts of the city. The billboards and gas stations and hot dog stands and cocktail lounges and steak houses were multiplying in heterogeneous profusion like a mixture of small animals that had been bred artificially in a lab to produce hybrids. Hot-dog stands that looked like schoolhouses turned out to be cocktail lounges. Gas stations sold road maps and chocolate bars, fresh flowers and contraceptives, provided pinball machines, clean rest rooms, free literature on Christian Science, and information on all subjects from food to hair tonic.
Here and there a church spire rose in contemptuous dignity above all this squalid mismating.
They passed one now. The bells were ringing and some people were standing on the lawn outside, stiff as statues, as if the rigidity of mind and purpose that was required once a week by their religion had extended to their bodies. Every Sunday morning they climbed into their iron suits and clanged away to church with righteous noise, looking narrowly through their visors at the ungodly and the other-godly.
“What time is it?” Charles said.
“Nine.”
Nine o’clock Sunday morning on a summer day. It seemed good to Charles, a good time to start all over, to begin a new life.
“It’d be kind of nice to be religious,” Forbes said. “You wouldn’t feel so much responsibility for yourself, you know. It’s like passing the buck to Jesus. But me, I’m not built for it. I’m a moral man. I don’t have to have any morals read to me out of a book by some little squirt with his collar on backwards, who couldn’t make a living any other way than by shooting off his mouth.”
Charles thought, the ungodly, too, peer through visors.
“An uncle of mine got religion,” Forbes said. “He went out to California and became a monk in one of those new religious places. They milked him of all his money and he died in an asylum. They have a lot of places like that in California. Maybe the sun goes to their heads out there.”
“As someone has already said, it’s the last point west for the desperate. After California, comes the Pacific Ocean.”
Perhaps he would take Martha there some day for a holiday. She had always said she didn’t care to travel, but he realized now that it was because she never had traveled. She was a little afraid, just as she used to be afraid of eating in restaurants because she wasn’t accustomed to it.
He must be careful how he approached her though. There was no use asking, “Would you like to go to California?” She would instinctively refuse. He must be more definite about it and decisive. “Come on, we’re going to California.” She was, in many respects, like a child. Children function better within clean-cut boundaries and rules; given their choice about everything, they lose the ability to make a choice at all. The possible and the impossible become equally possible, and in this confusion they must be guided.
He would be firmer, much firmer about everything. Money, for instance. She wasn’t extravagant by nature, but she had been spending money recklessly the past year and they had lived beyond his income. It was entirely his fault, he admitted. He wanted her to have everything and he had set her no limits. Consequently, she had spent the money without thought and probably without pleasure. Her checkbooks were always in a mess, and she never knew within a thousand dollars how much money she had in her account because she never bothered to open her bank statements. She piled them all up, neatly and in order of date, in a corner of her desk. He smiled, thinking of how orderly she was even about bank statements that she had no intention of reading.