Sitting in the cramped little seat, half-dozing, with the wind in her ears, rushing toward the grave she had never seen and whose meaning she still did not truly understand, Lucy was thinking, too, of the last time she had seen Oliver. It had been nearly three o’clock in the morning and she knew that Oliver had seen Tony earlier and that he had tried to call her, because he told her later, in the cold, empty, echoing house in New Jersey, after she had come in, weary and unsatisfied, turning the young soldier away from the door …
“No,” she said to the lieutenant, barring the way, not turning the key in the lock, “you can’t come in. It’s too late. And don’t send the taxi away. Go home, like a good boy. Tomorrow’s another day.”
“I love you,” the boy said.
Oh, God, she thought. He means it, too. It’s the war. A couple of sad, clutching hours in a shabby roadhouse room, to console the wounded, and they say I love you. Why do I do it? she thought, exhausted, remembering that she had to be in the laboratory at nine in the morning. I must have pity on myself, too.
“Don’t talk like that,” she said.
“Why not?” The boy put his arms around her and tried to kiss her.
“Because it makes everything too complicated.”
She let him kiss her briefly. Then she pushed him away.
“Tomorrow night?” he said.
“Call me in the afternoon,” she said.
“I’m being shipped out in three more days,” he said, pleading. “Please …”
“All right,” she said.
“It was wonderful,” he whispered.
Payment, she thought wryly. A polite well-brought-up boy, who has carried his manners over with him into the war.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come in?”
She laughed and waved him off and he smiled sadly and went down the steps toward where the taxi was waiting, with its motor going and its lights on, at the curb. He looked sorrowful and lonely and rather frail, even in his officer’s overcoat, and too young and polite for what was ahead of him. Watching him, Lucy felt confused, uncertain about the value of what she had done that night, and which until that moment she had thought was an act of generosity and pity. Maybe, she thought, it will only make him sadder in the long run.
The taxi drove off. She shrugged and unlocked the door and went into the house.
She put on the light in the hall and started toward the steps, in a hurry to get to bed. Then she stopped and sniffed. There was a strong smell of cigarette smoke, coming from the living room. I must talk to the cleaning woman, she thought, irritated, about smoking while she works. Then she remembered that the cleaning woman only came in twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, and this was not a Monday or Thursday.
Lucy hesitated. Then she went into the living room. From the doorway, in the dark, she saw the glow of a cigarette and the shadowy bulk of someone sitting in a chair that had been pulled into the center of the carpet. She turned on the light.
Oliver was sitting there, with his coat on, smoking, hunched deep in the chair, facing her. She hadn’t seen him in five months and she noticed that he was thinner than the last time and that he seemed much older. His eyes were sunken in their sockets, and his mouth was twisted with fatigue.
“Oliver,” she said.
“Hello, Lucy.” He didn’t stand up. His head rolled a little and he licked his lips and she realized that he had been drinking.
“Have you been here long?” she asked. She took off her coat and threw it on a chair. She felt uncomfortable and a little afraid. It wasn’t like him to arrive unannounced or to drink too much, or to sit like that, in his coat, brooding and obscurely threatening, in the dark, in the chair that seemed to have been deliberately aimed at the doorway.
“A couple of hours,” he said. “I don’t know.” He spoke slowly, his voice a little thick and deliberate. “I called from New York but you weren’t home.”
“Can I get you anything?” she asked. “A drink? A sandwich?”
“I don’t want anything,” he said.
“Are you on leave?” she asked. “How much time do you have?”
“I’m shipping out tomorrow,” he said. “Overseas.”
“Oh,” she said. Everybody is shipping out this week, she thought. The entire Army. If I weren’t so tired, she thought, I would undoubtedly feel something else besides this.
She shivered a little. “It’s cold in here,” she said. “You should’ve turned the heat up.”
“I didn’t notice,” he said.
She went over to the thermostat on the wall and turned it up, to the point at which it said, 80 degrees, Summer Heat. She didn’t do it because she expected the heat to come up fast enough to do any good, but to keep herself busy, to avoid the direct, examining stare of her husband.
“I’m hungry,” she said. “I think I’ll go see what’s in the icebox. You sure I can’t bring you something?”
“I’m sure,” he said. He doused his cigarette into the ashtray on the arm of his chair and watched her as she went out toward the kitchen.
In the kitchen, she dawdled, staring into the icebox, not wanting anything, but not wanting to go back and face Oliver again, annoyed with herself for being afraid of him, after so many years. She wondered if he was going to sleep in the house that night and if he was going to insist upon sleeping in the same bed with her. Before he had gone into the Army, they had had separate rooms, and there had been long periods when he hadn’t touched her at all. Then, suddenly, and for no particular reason or stimulus that she could ever discover, he would move into her room and stay with her three or four nights in a row. Then he would be as passionate, almost, as in the first days of their marriage, except that mixed with the hunger and the pleasure she would sense a hidden melancholy and regret.
Once he had gone into the Army she had volunteered to come down to see him at the various camps where he had been stationed, but he had refused to allow her to do it, saying that the work she was doing was too important to be sacrificed. He wrote her, dutifully, once a week, affectionate letters much more like the urbane and confident man he had been in the first years of her marriage than the abstracted and harried business executive he had seemed to become ever since they had left Hartford.
From time to time, after the Thanksgiving on which he had brought Tony home, she had thought of leaving him. If, among the men she knew, there had been one she could have persuaded herself she loved, she would have asked Oliver for a divorce.
Then the war came and Oliver went away. He was too old, really, to join up, and she was sure that he had done it to get away from her and the insoluble, continuing problem she presented to him, and she had allowed everything to slide, telling herself that when the war was over some final decision would have to be reached.
Standing in front of the refrigerator, looking in at the almost-bare shelves, she sighed, thinking about all this. It’s not much of a marriage, she thought wryly, but it’s a marriage. Probably it’s no worse than most.
There were some bottles of beer in the icebox and a piece of Swiss cheese, but she decided against them, although now she realized she was thirsty and would have liked the beer. She took out a bottle of milk instead, and poured herself a glass. Then she took a box of crackers from a shelf and carried it, with the glass of milk, into the living room. Let that be his last image of his wife to take to the wars with him, she thought, amused at her female slyness, innocently and girlishly sipping at a glass of milk at three o’clock in the morning.
Oliver hadn’t moved. He was still sitting, planted low in his chair, staring down at the carpet, a new cigarette hanging from his lips and the collar of his trenchcoat turned up around his ears.