“That isn’t his story, Lucy,” Oliver said quietly.
“No, of course not. He wants to make trouble. He told me himself. Once he even told me he was going to write you and say we were lovers so that you’d kick me out and I’d have to turn to him. What can I do to make you believe me?”
“Nothing,” Oliver said. “Because you’re a liar.”
“No,” Lucy said. “Don’t say that.”
“You’re a liar,” Oliver said. “And you disgust me.”
Her defenses overrun and all pretense suddenly abandoned, she walked blindly toward him, her arms out in front of her. “No … please, Oliver …”
“Keep away from me,” Oliver said. “That’s the worst part. The lies. The unforgivable part. After a while, maybe I could forget your summertime college boy. But the lies! Especially the lie about Tony. Good God, what were you trying to do? What kind of a woman are you?”
Lucy slumped into a chair, her head down. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said dully. “I’m so scared, Oliver. I’m so scared. I want so much to save us, both of us, our marriage.”
“God damn such marriages,” Oliver said. “Lying in his arms, laughing about me, complaining. Telling him between kisses that I was cold, I was a tyrant. With your son outside, peering through the window, because you were too eager to jump into bed to make sure the blinds were drawn properly.”
Lucy moaned. “It wasn’t like that.”
Oliver was standing over her now, raging. “Is that the marriage you’re so anxious to save?”
“I love you,” she whispered, her head still down, not looking at Oliver. “I love you.”
“Am I supposed to be melted by that?” Oliver asked. “Am I supposed to say now that it’s all right that you’ve lied to me for fifteen years and all right that you’re going to lie to me for the next fifteen? Just because, when you’ve been found out, you’re brazen enough to say you love me?”
“This is the first time,” Lucy said hopelessly. “I never lied to you before. I swear it. I don’t know what happened to me. You shouldn’t have left me alone. I begged you not to. You said you were going to come up and you never did. I told him I wasn’t going to see him again. You can ask him.”
Suddenly Oliver picked up his hat and coat and overnight bag. Frightened, Lucy looked up. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” Oliver said. “I’m getting out of here.”
Lucy stood up, putting out her hand toward him. “I’ll promise anything,” she said. “I’ll do anything. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t.”
“I’m not leaving you yet,” Oliver said. “I have to get off by myself till I can decide what to do.”
“Will you call me?” Lucy asked. “Will you come back?”
Oliver took a deep breath. He sounded exhausted. “We’ll see,” he said. He went out of the cottage and a moment later Lucy heard the car start. She stood in the middle of the room, dry-eyed, drawn, listening to the sound of the engine. The door from the hallway was flung open and Tony came into the room.
“Where’s Daddy?” he asked harshly. “I heard the car. Where did he go?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. She put out her hand to touch Tony’s shoulder, but he pulled away and rushed onto the porch. She could hear him running down the road, his voice growing smaller and smaller, calling after his father, and the noise of the car diminishing and then vanishing in the distance.
12
FOR THE NEXT TEN days and nights, Oliver kept to himself as much as he could, spending as little time as possible in his office and avoiding all his friends. He gave the colored maid the time off, telling her that he was going to eat out, and she went down to Virginia to visit her family, leaving him alone in the house.
Each night, after coming home from the office, Oliver prepared his dinner and ate it, with austere and solitary formality, in the dining room. Then he neatly washed the dishes and went into the living room and sat in front of the fireplace until one or two o’clock in the morning, not reading, not turning on the radio, but merely sitting there, staring at the cold swept hearth until he felt tired enough to go to sleep.
He didn’t call or write Lucy. When he finally got in touch with her, he wanted to know exactly what he was going to do. All his life Oliver had come to decisions unhurriedly, after long and thoughtful examination. He wasn’t a vain man, but he wasn’t modest, either, and he believed in his intelligence and his ability to reach conclusions that would stand up to the test of events. Now he had to come to a conclusion about his wife and his son and himself and he gave himself time and solitude for the process.
The process was long and more difficult than he had imagined it would be, because instead of reasoning out the problem, he kept imagining Lucy and Jeff together, the murmur of their voices, the low laughter in the darkened room, and the intolerable gestures of love. At those moments, alone in the empty house, he was tempted to write Lucy and tell her it was all over and that he never wanted to see her again. But he didn’t write the letter. Perhaps in a week or two, the letter would be written, but it would come as a result of severe reflection, not as a result of self-torment. He had given himself this time to regain control of himself; when the control was re-established, complete, he would act.
His jealousy, if that was what it was, hit him harder than it might have hit another man, who was accustomed to being jealous. The jealous man secretly believes in his own betrayal. He is in a state of siege and is convinced that somehow, somewhere, the wall will be breached, and makes his pessimistic adjustments beforehand to cope with his defeat. Oliver had never imagined that he might be betrayed and was unprepared for it and found himself, for the first few days, disarmed and overrun.
Curiously, he thought of what other men must have done in similar situations. After all, it was a common enough phenomenon. What were the lines of Leontes?
“There have been
Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now, And many a man there is, even at this present,
Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm,
That little thinks she has been sluiced in ’s absence …”
He didn’t remember the rest of the speech, but he remembered it was apposite. He got up and took down a big volume of Shakespeare’s plays and opened it to The Winter’s Tale and thumbed through the pages until he found the passage.
“Should all despair,” Oliver read,
“That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind
Would hang themselves. Physic for ’t, there’s none;
It is a bawdy planet.”
Oliver closed the book and put it down and chuckled, briefly. Shakespeare, for once, made it simpler than it was. A bawdy planet, the poet said, poetically, and that was explanation enough for him. After fifteen years of marriage, Oliver thought, this didn’t explain Lucy to him. He tried to clarify for himself just what he did think of his wife. Reserved, devoted, moderate, he thought, anxious to please him and win his approval. Generally obedient, he thought, grinning sourly at the echo of the wedding ceremony, given only to the lesser sins of sentimentality, inefficiency, timidity.