Now the image that had taken the place of Bernice’s swiftly left my mind, rushed into the room beyond and presented itself to me in the flesh, dressed in a sleeveless house frock with a little rubberized apron over it. No peach negligees here. Little cracked patent-leather pumps, each with a childish strap over the instep, side by side on the floor, immovable in angry determination. Within them were the same small graceful feet that had danced with me eight years ago to the strains of The Japanese Sandman, that I had kissed many times in fervor, and once, much later, trodden on brutally with my whole weight, to make her cry out, to show her who was master and that she must not throw things at me, especially hot coffee.
At sight of me, Maxine became galvanized into action. She flashed out of the chair as suddenly as though a spring had been released under her, letting it rock unheeded behind her, and started out of the room in the opposite direction, toward the bedroom. It occurred to me that, womanlike, she had timed the whole thing wrongly. That first creak of the chair, while I was still at the door, had told me she had heard me. She should have quitted the room then, if she was going to. But no, she had to wait and make sure that I would see her get up and leave the room, to drive the point home more forcibly. If it had been a man, and the sight of any one was as intolerable to him as she pretended the sight of me was to her, he would have gotten up in the first place, and not waited to do the whole thing under observation.
“Now, listen—” I remonstrated.
“Don’t talk to me,” she said, but inconsistently remained in the room and turned to me to do some talking on her own part. “So you finally decided it was time to come back, did you? Probably because you were hungry or needed a shave or something.”
“There’s where you’re wrong,” I laughed grimly, “I passed a million barber shops on my way here.”
“I suppose you think I should feel flattered that you came back at all. Well, I got along beautifully without you, it was so peaceful and quiet!”
“Sure it was.” I said, “with all the neighbors’ radios going at the same time.”
“You try that again,” she went on, “and you won’t find me here when you get back!”
I finally took my shoulder away from the door and came into the room. I sank into a chair and put a match to a cigarette. “What are you trying to do?” I said. “Start all over again? Didn’t we have enough yesterday?”
“You think all you have to do,” she assured me, “everytime anything comes up, is walk out the door and that ends it. Then you can come back when you please and everything’ll be peaches and cream.”
She was crying meanwhile.
“You don’t act the least bit sorry. And oh, Wade, the awful things you said! They haunted me all night.”
Outside the window a radio started to play Kiss and Make Up. She drooped toward me until our foreheads touched. I closed my eyes, thought hard of Bernice, and kissed her devoutly. But she must have noticed something, because she remarked half-laughingly, but with an undertone of injury, “It’s just like taking medicine, isn’t it?”
I told her it wasn’t at all. “How do you get that way?”
Lord knows, it shouldn’t have been. I watched her as she stood by the window looking out, holding the green net curtain pinned to the frame with one hand. She was young, younger than I was, undoubtedly younger than Bernice was. She was slim-waisted. We had decided not to have children. I didn’t want them around. She had never had any, so didn’t know what it would be like and consequently didn’t miss them. Hence her figure and her face were just what they were the night I first looked at her. But I had looked at that face daily now for several thousand days. I mean, even Cleopatra would have palled on one in less time than that. And furthermore, Maxine had never outgrown the fads and foibles of the season I met her. It was as though she had crystallized immediately after marrying me. She still wore the lumpy, chopped-off, bobbed hair of 1920. She still put rouge on in two round fever sores when she went out. Though I hadn’t danced with her in a long time, I suspected her of still shaking her whole body in your arms. The jazz age had been deplorable enough, as I remembered it, but to have to live with a leftover from it was asking too much. Good looking or otherwise.
“You’ll never know,” she said, still at the window, “just what I went through last night and this morning.”
“We’ve got to cut out this animal-baiting, both of us,” I suggested dully.
“It’s funny about a man,” she went on, as though talking to herself. “In the beginning, they do all the running after you, they can’t let you alone, can’t live without you. And then just as soon as you begin to see things their way, and tell yourself, ‘Yes, he was right, I can’t live without him either,’ they seem to have gotten over it. When anything comes up, you walk out that door with a bang, and I know what you’re thinking just as though I were inside your head. You’re thinking: ‘I’ve had enough of her for a while! I’m not going to think about her again until I’m good and ready to come back.’ But I sit here thinking about nothing else but you the whole time you’re gone. It’s funny, that’s all.”
“Well, I’m here now,” I said with an inward sigh, “so come on over, and if you still want to cry some more, I’ll mop up after you: and if you want to smile, why, I’ll smile right back at you.”
She didn’t cry any more, but she didn’t smile much either; she seemed to be contented just as she was, in my arms. I thought, “Good Lord! what am I going to do with this kid? I wish she’d fall in love with someone else all at once.” I stroked the top of her head and pressed my check to it, and touched the tip of her ear, where she had a little pendant of violet glass attached, and lifted it with my finger and let it drop again, the stupid ornament.
I was too sensible to wish I’d never met her and never married her, because our love had been beautiful while it lasted, but all my life I’ve hated responsibility, and what worse responsibility was there than this: to have her keep right on loving me after I had stopped loving her (except as a reflex action).
“And I sat there until two o’clock,” she was saying, “and the light got so it burned my eyes, so I put it out and kept right on sitting there in the dark. And I thought any moment the phone would ring, I said to myself, ‘I can’t go to bed like this, without hearing from him. My Wade never did this to me before.’ But the phone just wouldn’t ring. I got up one time and took it in my hand and shook it, and still it kept quiet. Then after a while it got so I didn’t care very much any more, the worst was over, and I couldn’t’ve felt any more rotten than I did. You understand, don’t you, honey? I just couldn’t keep on wanting anything as much as all that. It was taking everything I had. Then I closed my eyes a second, and all of a sudden it was broad daylight and the dumbwaiter buzzed for the garbage. I felt like going down on it with the rest of the cast-off junk. That’s when I did most of my heavy crying, when the sun started to come in the kitchenette window and I smelt bacon broiling and heard the lady over us say, ‘Get up, Sam, your coffee’s ready.’ Gosh, it would’ve been sweet to see your morning grouch just then, and hear you say, ‘Where the hell are the towels?’ and ‘Jesus, how I hate this place!’ and all the things you always say! I even envied the morning you threw the cup of coffee at me, because I had you with me then, even if my chest did get scalded.”